An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley Review: A Morality Play of Enduring Social Force

Set on a single evening in 1912 in the Birling family home in the fictional industrial town of Brumley, the play opens on a scene of comfortable celebration: Arthur Birling, a wealthy factory owner, magistrate, and local politician, is marking the engagement of his daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, son of a rival magnate. Also present are Birling's wife Sybil and their son Eric, whose drinking problem the family discreetly ignores. The gathering is broken by the arrival of a man calling himself Inspector Goole, who announces that a young working-class woman named Eva Smith has died by drinking disinfectant. What follows, as the BBC's study resource describes it, is "a tense and uncomfortable investigation" through which the family discovers that each of them is implicated in Eva Smith's destruction. Priestley deploys dramatic irony throughout — the audience, watching a play set in 1912, knows what the characters cannot: the catastrophes of two World Wars, the collapse of the class certainties Arthur Birling so confidently proclaims.

Priestley wrote the play in a single week, and it was first performed in the Soviet Union in May 1945 before receiving its British premiere at the New Theatre in London the following year — with Ralph Richardson as Inspector Goole, Harry Andrews as Gerald Croft, and Alec Guinness among the cast. The original reviews were mixed; the Observer's J.C. Trewin found the play somewhat heavy, though the Times delivered the memorable verdict, as quoted in The Guardian: "Bang! Bang! Mr Priestley lets drive with both barrels." The play's modern reputation was decisively transformed by Stephen Daldry's National Theatre revival, which one critic, as recorded in The Guardian, credited with "reclaiming JB Priestley's play from the realms of banal period whimsy." Daldry's staging transferred to Broadway in 1994, where it ran for 454 performances. As Wikipedia notes, the production's success prompted a wide critical reappraisal of Priestley as a politically engaged playwright offering a sustained critique of the hypocrisy of English society.

The play's power derives from Priestley's precise, unsentimental architecture of blame. Arthur Birling functions, as Wikipedia observes, as a dramatic vehicle to criticise capitalism, the arrogance of the wealthy middle class, and the ignorance of the older generation. Each family member's encounter with Inspector Goole peels back a layer of self-protective respectability to reveal complicity — economic exploitation, social condescension, and moral abandonment. Inspector Goole himself operates as the vehicle for Priestley's socialist convictions, his final warning to the Birlings concerning collective responsibility designed to resonate far beyond the drawing room. The time-gap between the play's setting and its 1945 composition is not incidental: it allows Priestley to frame Edwardian complacency as a known catastrophe, giving the drama its particular dramatic irony and its edge of prophecy.

The play's very economy — its single-night setting, its small cast, its relentless thesis-driven structure — can read to some audiences as schematic. Even at its premiere, the Observer noted the play could feel heavy-handed. Because Priestley's moral argument is explicit and the characters are designed to embody positions as much as to inhabit fully rounded inner lives, readers looking for psychological ambiguity or narrative surprise may find the play's mechanics too visible. Its widespread use as a prescribed text for GCSE and IGCSE English Literature courses means that many readers first encounter it in a heavily annotated, pedagogical context — a framing that can flatten the theatrical experience the script was written to produce on a stage.

This Heinemann edition — a standard educational text — is positioned squarely for the student and academic market, which aligns with the play's established role in British and international school curricula. But the play also rewards readers approaching it outside the classroom: its critique of wealth, entitlement, and the ease with which the privileged disown responsibility for the vulnerable has lost none of its contemporary resonance. For readers of mid-20th century British drama, An Inspector Calls sits alongside the foundational works of the period; for general readers, it offers a compact, high-stakes theatrical argument that can be read in a single sitting. Priestley's insistence — voiced through Inspector Goole — that individuals cannot simply wall themselves off from the consequences of their actions on others remains, as the play's enduring global performance record attests, both dramatically compelling and stubbornly, uncomfortably relevant.