How does the playwright create tension throughout this act and ensure that the onlooker's attention is held for the next two acts?

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How does the playwright create tension throughout this act and ensure that the onlooker’s attention is held for the next two acts?

 From the outset, the author Priestly holds the audience’s attention with a mixture of suspense, expectation, and sheer enjoyment of the quality of his writing. The author transforms the convivial atmosphere of the dining room into an inquisition on to why, where and who could have been the instigator of this young girl’s suicide?

        In the first few pages Priestly describes how at rise of the curtain the four Birlings and Gerald   are seated at the table with Arthur Birling at one end, his wife at the other, Eric downstage, and Sheila and Gerald seated upstage.  The lighting is “pink and intimate.”  In the opening scene, the atmosphere is warm friendly and loving (due to the pink lighting). The Birling’s are sat round a dining table celebrating their daughter’s engagement to Gerald Croft whose dad is Mr Birling’s rival in business as Mr Birling reminds us in one of this many speech’s

“and now you’ve brought us together, and perhaps we may look forward to the time when Crofts and Birling are no longer competing but are working together”.

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 Once we have found this out, this has already caused some tension because it is a special day. All Mr Birling can talk about is business and work, but as I thought deeper into the meaning of this and realised that the playwright may have meant to cause tension through suggesting that Mr Birling only see’s his daughter’s marriage as a step up on the business ladder, to his advantage because after all

“ Crofts Limited is both older and bigger than Birling and Company”

        Before the Inspector arrives, there are many other hints of tension amongst the ...

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