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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 172 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
An Inspector Calls
by J.B. Priestley
It is 1912. A young working class woman brought to her knees by poverty and ill treatment decides that she can bear it no more. A bottle of disinfectant is consumed as she dies agonisingly in hospital. Nobody grieves – yet!
Inspector Goole arrives at the house of a rich and prospering capitalist family, the Birlings, in the midst of a dinner party. This is the scene that J.B. Priestley sets for An Inspector Calls.
Priestley wrote the play in the winter of 1944 with an eye to the growing discontent amongst workers in Britain as Hitler’s Reich collapsed. The working class began to question what sort of society would follow war and depression. Should capitalism continue when it had led to such barbarism and poverty?
The year 1912 was deliberately picked by Priestley to unfold his plot. This was the period of the Great Unrest, of mass working class revolt. As competition dragged the world towards a brutal war, workers in Britain launched a powerful series of struggles. From 1910 a mass strike wave developed, culminating in a number of local general strikes, barricades and shootings as the army entered the scene to defend the government. Enormous class conflicts continued up to the very beginning of the First World War.
The backdrop to this was growing class polarisation in which workers were left poorer. One estimate suggests that between 1900 and 1914 average wages fell by 10 percent.
It is against this background that the complacent and uncaring Birlings dine. Their shortsightedness on the eve of war is brilliantly summed up in Arthur Birlings drunken dinner table speech, in which he talks of progress making war impossible. He then cites, in support of his thesis that capitalism is magnificent, the fact that the Titanic, just built and about to sail, is ‘absolutely unsinkable’. An iceberg gave a flash of light to his thesis and was an omen for the system.
With the arrival of Inspector Goole, all becomes tense. His persistent inquisition begins to show how their exploitation of working class lives has forced one poor woman to pay the ultimate price. Goole is the eyes of millions of workers looking upon their rulers, wretched and naked before them. His anger at what has passed and his contempt for the Birlings as they seek to blame each other is that which bore the Great Unrest. It is the anger and contempt which followed the Second World War and prompted Tory MP Quintin Hogg, in fear, to demand, ‘Give the people social reform or they will give you social revolution.’
The poignancy of the present production of this play is that anger and contempt are in the air again. The last decade has left workers bitter and alienated from the political structures by which the capitalist class rule – monarchy, parliament – in a way that resembles the period of the Great Unrest.
Bitter class conflicts look set to erupt as Major’s weak and vicious Tory government seeks to offload the bill for squandered wealth on Britain’s workers. If you can scrape together the money, go and feast yourself on An Inspector Calls. Feast also upon excellent performances and direction that bring the play to life. Above all heed Inspector Goole’s message when he cries: ‘We are responsible for each other. The time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.’
Our modern day Birlings are served notice.
An Inspector Calls is at the Aldwych Theatre, London, prices £9–£20
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