‘An Inspector Calls’
‘An Inspector Calls’ was written in 1946 and set in 1912. It tells the story of an inspector who visits the Birling family, who are wealthy, trying to find out why a young pregnant girl has suddenly decided to commit suicide. J.B Priestly chose to set the play in 1912 as a warning. The Birlings are smug and complacent; they believe that the titanic wont sink and war won’t happen. J.B Priestly was writing with the benefit of hindsight because he knew that the horrors of the two world wars would happen. He was warning the audience not to be complacent and to remember their sense of social responsibility and that the war was coming. The end of Act 2 and the beginning of Act 2 are important to play because the guilt of all the characters is revealed and the inspector’s final speech gives the audience an important social message. The play has contemporary relevance to a modern audience because now in the modern day a lot more people know a lot more about the war and the titanic and what the Birlings has got to go through.
In ‘An Inspector Calls’, J.B Priestly uses the language to create different, effective effects. He does this because he wants the audience to steadily work out the individual characters personalities. For example in Act 2 Mrs Birling labelled Eva Smith ‘a girl of that sort’ This suggests to the audience that Mrs Birling she is different, higher class and therefore socially superior to Eva smith. The word ‘girl’ shows that she feels that she is just another person that no one cares about and no one would care if she weren’t there. This tells us that Mrs Birling isn’t really a very nice person and that she doesn’t like Eva Smith. This could suggest to the audience that Mrs Birling could have pushed Eva Smith into committing suicide because she could have said something horrible because she thinks she is better than everyone else and never liked Eva Smith in the first place. J.B Priestly has made Mrs Birlings character so unsympathetic because he wants the audience to think that Mrs Birling has a significant part in the story line of the killing of an innocent person.
