Modern texts, Year 11: 1912 and 1945, stagecraft and dramatic method (An Inspector Calls option)

1945

HintThe year the Second World War ended.

The whyPriestley wrote it in a single week. Its first British production followed in London in 1946.

The Soviet Union

HintNot Britain: a wartime ally to the east.

The whyIt opened in Moscow and Leningrad because no suitable London theatre was free.

1914

HintTwo years after the evening of the play.

The whyThe first audience had lived through that war and another. Every confident word Mr Birling says about the future is heard against what they knew.

The Titanic sank on its first voyage

HintIt happened in the North Atlantic.

The whyIn the play it has not yet met its fate. Priestley uses the best-known disaster of the age to mark Mr Birling as a man who cannot see what is coming.

Labour

HintThe party of the left.

The whyThe play belongs to that moment: a country deciding, after two wars, how much its people owed one another.

The audience knows what the characters do not, so the family's confidence looks blind

HintHindsight.

The whySetting it earlier also shows a world before the welfare state, in which a girl like Eva had nothing to fall back on.

From a soft, pinkish glow to a brighter, harsher light

HintThink of a cosy room, then of an interrogation.

The whyThe warm light suits a family pleased with itself. The stronger light suggests that things are about to be seen clearly, like a lamp turned on a suspect.

The dining room

HintThe family has just finished a meal.

The whyThe set never changes. One reading is that the single room shows how shut off the family is from the town outside, and gives them nowhere to escape the questions.

That he may not have shown everyone the same photograph, so they may not all have known the same girl

HintGerald is the one who points it out.

The whyThis small piece of stage business carries the whole argument of Act 3 about whether there was one girl or several.

The telephone

HintTwo calls are made from the house and one comes in.

The whyMr Birling rings the chief constable, Gerald rings the infirmary, and then it rings for them. The same object that seemed to clear the family brings the news that undoes them.

Yes: they are the playwright's own choices about what an audience sees and hears

HintA play is written to be performed, not only read.

The whyWriting about entrances, sounds, lighting and timing shows that you are treating the text as drama. Describe them accurately in your own words.