2 A RESOURCE PACK FOR TEACHERS CONTENTS A USER’S GUIDE 4 1. PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE i. Time and the Birlings 5 ii. The Social Context: 1912 and 1945 9 iii. The Social Context: The Play Today 11 iv. Political Play or Propaganda? 13 2. PRODUCING PRIESTLEY’S PLAY i. Frequently Asked Questions 15 ii. Who is the Inspector? 19 iii. Exploring Theatricality 21 iv. Film Facts 24 3. BEHIND THE SCENES i. In Rehearsal 25 ii. Collaborative Theatre 26 iii. Tricks of the Trade 28 iv. The Secret of Success 30 4. PRACTICAL APPROACHES 31 5. SELECTED FURTHER READING 39 Written for The Magenta Partnership by Kim Greengrass ©1999 3 SECTION ONE ~ Read the outlines of three of J.B.Priestley’s other dramatic works before considering the following questions. o? Can you find any important similarities between the summaries of Priestley’s CTIVITY other plays and An Inspector Calls? A o? How do the theories of time presented in these plays influence your W understanding of An Inspector Calls? P AST ? SHO o Use Sheila’s remark that “If it didn’t end tragically, then that’s lucky for us. But - it might have done.” (An Inspector Calls p. 70) as the starting point for a E , PRESENT collection of quotations from the play about alternative realities or what might PR have been. o? Can you think of other stage plays, films or books which explore concepts of time? (eg. the films Sliding Doors, Back to the Future etc) Do these present a similar view of time to that in Priestley’s work? AND FUTURE 1. Dangerous Corner (1932) STANTON: I think telling the truth is about as healthy as skidding at sixty round a corner. FREDA: And life’s got a lot of dangerous corners, hasn’t it Charles? STANTON: It can have if you don’t choose your route well. Dangerous Corner, Act III In his 1948 introduction to the play, Priestley explained that in Dangerous Corner he had wanted “to make use of the device of splitting time into two, thus showing what might have happened, an idea that has always fascinated me”. As TEACHER’S a group of friends gather in the drawing room after dinner, a small incident - the RESOURCE PACK playing of a musical box - sparks off two alternative sequences of events. At the AN beginning of the play, the playing of the musical box leads to a series of bitter INSPECTOR arguments, resulting in revelations of robbery, attempted rape, drug taking and CALLS manslaughter. At the end of the play, the same scene with the musical box is repeated, but this time the conversation takes a completely different turn: the WRITTEN FOR dangerous corner is avoided and the evening ends with cheerful conversation and a THE MAGENTA blissful oblivion to the dark secrets which each of the characters has hidden within. PARTNERSHIP BY KIM GREENGRASS 6 SECTION ONE ~ 2. Time and the Conways (1937) The three acts of this play take place in the same sitting room in Mrs Conway’s house, on the same night of the year - the night of her daughter Kay’s birthday. Where the structure is unusual is that Acts One and Three follow events on the night of Kay’s twenty-first birthday in 1919, while Act Two leaps into the future and allows Kay a glimpse of what will happen on her birthday in 1937. The 1919 P scenes depict a family party, the joyful return of Kay’s brother from the war and AST flirtations between the young people attending the party. This is in sharp contrast to Act Two which shows that the Conway family are all enduring lives of quiet , desperation: Mrs Conway has lost all her money; Carol, the most beautiful of all PRESENT her daughters, has died; her son Robin, who was greeted as a war hero in Act One, has left his wife and child; and the poised and confident Hazel is trapped in a terrifying marriage to the man she met at Kay’s party in 1919. In Act Three Kay is disturbed by her troubling vision of the future, but her older AND FUTURE brother, Alan offers some words of comfort: ALAN: Time doesn’t destroy anything. It merely moves us on - in this life - from one peep-hole to the next… But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we’re only a cross-section of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us - the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream. KAY: I’ll try to understand… so long as you really believe - and think it’s possible for me to believe - that Time’s not ticking our lives away… wrecking… and ruining everything… for ever… ALAN: No, it’s all right, Kay. I’ll get you that book. You know, I believe half our trouble now is because we think Time’s ticking TEACHER’S our lives away. That’s why we snatch and grab and hurt each RESOURCE other. PACK AN KAY: As if we were all in a panic on a sinking ship. INSPECTOR Time and the Conways, Act II CALLS WRITTEN FOR THE MAGENTA PARTNERSHIP BY KIM GREENGRASS 7 ii. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT: 1912 AND 1945 SECTION ONE ~ An Inspector Calls is set in 1912, before the beginning of the First World War, but was written during the winter of 1944/45, first reaching the stage in 1945, the year in which the Second World War ended. For director Stephen Daldry the play’s campaigning passion is inextricably linked to the new spirit of post-war optimism. He believes that 1945 is “probably the most crucial period in domestic British politics this century” - a time P AST when people were asking,“Do we want to go back to the Edwardian period or to create something vital and new, a romantic vision of the , future?”. PRESENT Priestley’s choice of a pre-war Edwardian setting was therefore a calculated attempt to draw a parallel between the experiences of the two world wars. As designer Ian MacNeil explains: AND FUTURE “Priestley lived with the First World War, the war to end all wars, survived it against the odds and then found himself in another horrific war. And so he believed he had the right to ask, ‘If I lived through the war to end all wars, why am I now living through another one? What got us into this situation? What is the failure of leadership and belief? What brought us to this folly?’ You can’t have this view of the Edwardians unless you are looking at it from the point of view of people who have just fought a war. “Priestley felt strongly that there’s no point in fighting another war simply to maintain the status quo: the point of this social upheaval is that some good must come of this. We should fight for a better society, not simply demonise the Germans as though badness and selfishness is something that only exists in Germany.” The 1945 play may have been set in the past but its purpose was to look to the TEACHER’S future, arguing strongly for a more positive society. Tony Benn MP believes that RESOURCE Priestley “consciously intended to make [An Inspector Calls] a contribution to public PACK understanding which, in its turn, he hoped might lead to a Labour victory after the AN war was over”. INSPECTOR CALLS WRITTEN FOR THE MAGENTA PARTNERSHIP BY KIM GREENGRASS 9 SECTION ONE ~ J.B.Priestley joined up in September 1914, at the very start of the First World War. He fought on the front line in France for most of the war, his time in combat only interrupted by a six month spell in hospital in 1917 after he was buried under a collapsed trench.Twenty- CTIVITY four year old Lieutenant Priestley was demobbed in late 1919 after A five years in the army. W P AST Read the following extract from J.B.Priestley’s Literature and Western Man (1960) SHO which bitterly recounts the experiences of his generation during the horrors of the - E First World War. After reading the extract, look again at the opening pages of An , PRESENT Inspector Calls, (particularly Birling’s speech, from p.4 “No, we won’t…” to p.7 PR “…we’ve had experience - and we know.”). Compare the two extracts and use the questions which follow to help your discussion. “In the very middle of this age the First World War rises like a wall of blood- red mountains. Its frenzied butchery, indefensible even on a military basis, AND FUTURE killed at least ten million Europeans, mostly young and free from obvious physical defects. After being dressed in uniform, fed and drilled, cheered and cried over before they were packed into their cattle-trucks, these ten million were then filled with hot lead, ripped apart by shell splinters, blown to bits, bayoneted in the belly, choked with poison gas, suffocated in mud, trampled to death or drowned, buried in collapsing dugouts, dropped out of burning aeroplanes, or allowed to die of diseases, after rotting too long in trenches that they shared with syphilitic rats and typhus-infected lice. Death, having come into his empire, demanded the best, and got it. This was no ordinary generation; it was the flower and fruit of an exceptionally long summer of European peace and prosperity, so much vintage blood; and the men among us who fought with it and saw it being destroyed, and the women still alive who cannot forget its wonderful bright promise, we believe to this day that the best companions of our youth, the liveliest minds and bravest hearts, all the golden TEACHER’S lads… went to that war and never came back from it.