Contrast is used in the opening with the piercing light of the Birlings’ house and the dim light in the street. Also, how pristine the house is compared to the street. This is very effective because the dirty street makes the house look even more perfect and immaculate, and the house makes the street look even more filthy and grimy.
The first words that were spoken were by the Birlings. The Birlings were well hidden so that all the focus was on their words. The words are spoken very jollily, because of the happy mood. However, it already becomes apparent that there is some tension between Birling and his son, Eric. Eric laughs at Mrs Birling’s comment about how Sheila will have to get used to her husband-to-be working all of the time, “Now, Sheila, don ‘t tease him. When you’re married you’ll realise that men with important work to do sometimes have to spend nearly all their time and energy on their business. You’ll have to get used to that, just as I had.” After this, Eric “guffaws” and this begins and argument between Sheila and himself. Mrs Birling stops this.
The Inspector appears a lot sooner in the Royal National Theatre Production, than in the book. He appears almost immediately as the Birlings begin to talk. Mr Birling in is the middle of boasting about the success of his company. The Inspector is not dressed in the 1912 period clothing; he is dressed in 1940s clothing. He is connected with the children in some ways because he is dressed in the same period clothing and he takes notice of them. Also, he gives one of the boys his hat to wear and an orange. Oranges would have been very hard to acquire during the war because they could not be imported.
It is as though the Inspector is listening in to what the Birlings are saying and the happy mood that they are all in. The Inspector seems quite malicious in some ways because he is attaining pleasure from ruining the Birling’s evening.
All of the time that the Inspector is listening is he standing by a lamppost; this makes him look eerie because the lamp is only giving off very dim light.
The Inspector rings the doorbell and interrupts Mr Birling explaining his success, “Low costs(referring to low wages), high profit.” When the doorbell rings, the house opens up and the audience can see a quaint dining room with posh decoration. The Inspector never enters the house, but one by one he entices the Birlings and Gerald down. The first character to come down is Mr Birling. The Inspector mends the staircase and he comes down to the street.
Mr Birling, like Mrs Birling tries to escape blame and refuses to admit responsibility. But the Inspector is too clever and outsmarts him with clever words.
Sheila is the next to be interrogated. You can tell that she feels very sorry for what she has done, but instead of letting her go easy because she is sorry, the Inspector rubs it in even more, “Yes but you can’t help her. It’s too late. She’s dead.”
The wall is rarely broken down between the characters from 1912 and the characters from 1945. Occasionally, the wall is broken, like when, at the beginning of the play, the children are shooed away from the house by one of the Birlings. Throughout the play, various characters in 1945 dress appear on the stage. They all had non-speaking parts and the appearance of them is fairly uncanny. They are all different ages, from school children to elderly folk. This people are used to bring down the Birlings. They could possibly be the ghosts of the future.
Another wall is the wall between the actors and the audience. This wall is broken down when Sheila does her big speech. She makes eye contact with various members around the audience. The Inspector also breaks down the wall with his final speech. It is rather unnerving for the audience.
Gerald was acted very well. The actor who played him used just the right accent, more upper class than Birling. His interrogation is dramatic because Sheila stands there the whole time, whilst he is being accused of having an affair.
When Mrs Birling finally comes down with the rest of the characters onto the street, Edna lays down a carpet for her to walk on, she is too high to touch the street with her own feet. The carpet is red, like royalty. Edna then follows Mrs Birling around with a chair for her to sit on. Edna only does this for Mrs Birling, not Mr Birling or Sheila or Eric. This is because Mrs Birling is higher class than Mr Birling and this means that the Birling children are “mixed class”.
Mrs Birling is dressed in a very powerful, flowing dress. She looks, despite her age, very beautiful. When she first comes down onto the street, she is very self-confident. All through her interrogation, she denies all responsibility, “If necessary I shall be glad to answer any questions the Inspector wishes to ask me.” Sheila tries her hardest to shield her mother from the Inspector’s clever questions and the loss of pride that she is about to receive, “you mustn’t try to build up a kind of wall between us and that girl. If you do, then the Inspector will just break it down. And it’ll be all the worse when he does.” Mrs Birling refuses to listen to Sheila’s warnings and is brought down like the rest of them. In some ways, Mrs Birling’s conviction is the worst out of all of them because. This is because she is so high and mighty and is brought down with a crash when she finds out that her ‘perfect’ son was the disgusting awful man who made Eva Smith become pregnant.
All throughout the play, Eric has been picked on and finally it comes out what he did to help kill Eva Smith. Eric is the last to be interrogated, and in my opinion, in the Royal National Theatre Production, his interrogation was the most dramatic. This was because he accuses Birling of not being a good father, “Because you’re not the type of father a chap could go to when he’s in trouble.” We come to feel sorry for Eric because not only has he been accused or stealing and making an unknown girl pregnant, his heavy drinking has been brought to the attention of his mother.
The characters all go on fighting and accusing Eric, when suddenly Eric throws the decanter that is holding, what looked like whiskey, onto the ground and it smashes. He then grabs his mother’s neck and starts to try to strangle her. He is angry with his mother for two reasons. The first being that she refuses to take any responsibility for the death of Eva Smith. The second reason is probably because she has made his interrogation a lot worse than it should have been. She did this by ridiculing the man who got Eva Smith pregnant. Mrs Birling becomes more and more angry and accusing towards to the young man responsible. This is very satisfying to the audience because be already have worked out that it must be Eric. This device is called dramatic irony and it is used frequently throughout the play.
The whole family continue to fight until the Inspector shouts, “Stop!” Abruptly, the lighting changed.
The Inspector then carries out his final speech. Him saying, “Stop!” brings everyone’s attention solely to the Inspector. The actor who played the Inspector performed the speech very well, although it did sound very dramatic. The Inspector breaks down the wall between the audience and himself. We become the people who have to be addressed. He is telling us that we should be responsible for our actions, not just the Birlings. The Inspector, as well as Sheila, makes eye contact with the audience. It is very unnerving.
The final speech itself is very effective. The Inspector uses the power of three, “Millions and millions and millions,” and “Fire and blood and anguish.” The words, “Fire, blood and anguish,” hit the audience very hard. This is because they are relevant at anytime, not just in 1945, when the play was written. In the play they are relevant to the death of a young woman, in 1945 the are significant to both of the World Wars, and today it seems to refer to the September 11th Terror Attacks. I think that these words were included with intent, by Priestly, because he knew that there would always be a time when blood would be shed. It is really dramatic irony because we know that no long after the year that the play is based in there was and World War, and then another one following some years later. Priestly. It is The Inspector uses strong biblical language. He is like a New Testament angel, but he also speaks like an Old Testament prophet giving due warnings. His biblical language lends authority. It is as though the Inspector is a preacher from the church; he has higher knowledge than everyone else.
The Inspector’s language and tone of voice significantly changes during his speech. It becomes much more powerful and preaching. The wall is broken down between the characters and the audience. The Inspector is not just lecturing the characters for their contribution to a girl’s death, but also us for everything that we have done wrong. This is made even more effective because the Inspector says part of his speech whilst standing up in one of the separate quarters from the theatre, where people would normally be sitting. He joins the audience.
The Inspector is very interesting because although this is a ‘Who done it?’ play, he does not seem at all worried about the legal side of things. The Inspector stays with the Birlings and Gerald for a very long time, but when he leaves he does not arrested anyone. The Inspector is only interested in moral implications. His strong words and his persistence forces the characters to convict themselves.
When the Inspector had finished interrogating all of the characters and had left, the lights in the house suddenly blew, the house tipped forward, the table and chairs broke, and all of the cutlery and crockery fell from the house onto the street. This made a tremendous noise and was very much a surprise. I think it made everyone, who was not expecting it, in the audience jump.
At this point all of the characters were sitting and lying around in various parts of the stage. They had all been brought down from their “ivory tower” into the grotty street. They were now lower than all of the working class people from the 1940s. These people had entered on the left hand side of the stage with a large cloud of smoke or fog and were staring down at the Birlings and Gerald. Some of them then proceeded to wrap brown war blankets around them. This brought the Birlings down even lower because the working class people were actually touching them and taking care of them.
Throughout the play Sheila is slowly undressing. To start with she is in a stunning white gown. The colour white makes her seem very innocent, this is until she is cross-examined. She falls into a puddle and makes her dress dirty. In the end she is just in her undergarments. Sheila has been brought the same as the rest of the Birlings, but instead of being brought down completely by the Inspector, she has brought herself down. Sheila is stripping herself of her grandeur and class she is becoming equal to Eva Smith.
Suddenly, they all begin to realise that they could have been tricked because the Inspector might have been showing them, “different photographs,” of, “Eva Smith,” or “Daisy Renton.” Eric and Sheila take a lot more convincing than the rest of the characters that they had no part to play in the death of Eva Smith, “(Eric) How can it? The girl’s dead, isn’t she? (Gerald) What girl? There were probably four or five different girls.” To prove to Eric and Sheila that they did not kill anyone Gerald goes over to the phone box and rings the infirmary.
Even after Gerald had proved that he was right, Sheila and Eric were still reluctant to celebrate. This is because they are aware of the moral message that they have received, “(Sheila) Everything we said had happened really had happened. If it didn’t end tragically, then that’s lucky for us. But it might have done.” While Gerald, Mrs Birling and Mr Birling all begin to celebrate, Eric and Sheila still refuse to join in. The house is put back together, the walls are mended, it is tipped back upright, the table is restored to its original position and the staircase is mended. This signifies that Mr and Mrs Birling are both very shallow people. They only care about themselves – after the terrible interrogation they go back to exactly how they were.
Then the phone rings.
Abruptly, the mood changes. A girl has died by suicide.
At the end of the play, when the curtain falls, the characters are separated from each other. Sheila, Eric and Edna are on the side of the curtain nearest the audience, Mr and Mrs Birling and Gerald are on the other side of the curtain. This is a separation from the people who are actually sorry for what they might have done, and the people who have not learned anything.
At this point all the people in the theatre are split, not into three groups of people, but four: the 2001 audience, Eric and Sheila, who have almost joined the 2001 audience, the 1945 audience and the people who are still in 1912, Mr and Mrs Birling and Gerald.
The audience who had never seen this version of the play before were all confused because they did not understand who the people in 1940s dress were, and what the meaning of having a war-torn set when the war had not yet struck. However, close study of the play helps our understanding of the director’s thinking here. The stage setting is supposed to remind the audience of what is still to come with wars.
The meaning of “An Inspector Calls” is reflected in a passage written by John Donne in the seventeen hundreds, ‘No man is an iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesse. Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankinde.’
This passage is talking about class, ‘every man is a peece of the continent,’ it is saying that all of mankind is a one. No matter what class you are, everyone is joined together.
I think that even though this play was written in 1945, it still has relevance today. The relevance being to the tragic terror attacks in the United States. Although the production that we saw was produced before the attack, it is still relevant. The Twin Towers attack has caused a lot of tension between different groups of people, Islam and other religions. In this case the Eva Smiths are the innocent people who were killed in New York City, and the civilians in Afghanistan who have been used and abused by different people in power, just like Eva Smith.
Another place that this play has relevance in is in the third world countries. Then people of those countries are dying and we are doing very little to help it.
“An Inspector Calls” not only has an impact about the events going on all around the world, but also about what is going on everyday all around Britain in the form of the homeless. Although organisations try to help them, such as The Big Issue, the government still makes it difficult for homeless people to get back into work and get a home again. Does this mean that we, everyday normal people, are also the Birlings of today’s world?
