The casualty estimate for World War I, both military and civilian, was over 40 million – 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. This includes 9.7 million military deaths and about 10 million civilian deaths. The Entente Powers lost more than 5 million soldiers and the Central Powers about 4 million. Then just a few short years later, World War II began, and racked up an even more impressive list; roughly 72 million. The civilian toll was around 47 million, including 20 million deaths due to war-related famine and disease. So it was a stunned and exhausted world that received John Boynton Priestley’s newest play, AN INSPECTOR CALLS.

BY NEIL MUNRO

Priestley by the end of the war was already a figure of some renown. His novel The Good Companions had become world famous, and his voice had become second in popularity to none other than Winston Churchill. Priestley wrote and delivered a personal view of the war for BBC Radio, chronicling the trials and tribulations of the ordinary working man and woman. The carnage, the courage, not to mention the optimism of the English people, seemed to need the popularity of an ordinary voice (rather than that of a professional politician) to soothe the daily wounds inflicted by Hitler’s buzz bombs and the massive battles being fought overseas.

10 Shaw Magazine / Spring 2008 Benedict Campbell, who will play Inspector Goole in the 2008 production of AN INSPECTOR CALLS (Photo by Shin Sugino).

11 This kind of destruction on such a grand scale Priestley wanted to write a play that focused on the profoundly affected Priestley’s views of both socialism terrible problems that could develop between people and and capitalism. Didactically speaking, his political theories classes, when human beings begin to live outside the never made much of an impact, as they seemed too boundaries of their own generosity; when they let loose passionate and heartfelt to be ‘politically mature’. But his the heartfelt bonds of compassion and drift off into a world heart bled for the suffering he witnessed every morning on of greed and fear. Although An Inspector Calls was written his way to the BBC building to broadcast his radio show in 1945, Priestley set the play circa 1912, adding to the or when he spoke to the gathering clumps of humanity story the poignant fact that neither war had occurred yet. that came to hear his famous voice on street corners and An Inspector Calls is a plea for compassion and in town halls; a voice full of comfort, humour and a understanding of each other’s weaknesses and constant reassurance that goodness, decency and common misfortunes, and a message that we are all inextricably sense had not deserted the planet altogether. bound to each other, and that what happens in Piccadilly really does affect the butterflies in Brazil. Priestley was “IT MAY OR MAY NOT BE A FANCIFUL basically operating on a theory that had not yet reached CONCEPT FULL-TO-THE-BRIM WITH anywhere near its modern popularity, that of the so- WISHFUL THINKING, BUT IT IS A GENTLE called “six degrees of separation”. This is the idea that, REMINDER THAT WHAT WE ALL HAVE if a person is one “step” away from each person he or IN COMMON IN THIS LIFE IS THE she knows and two “steps” away from each person who EXPERIENCE OF EACH OTHER.” is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each Priestley saw the war in a larger perspective than just a person on earth. It may or may not be a fanciful concept geo-political nightmare. He saw it as the result of full-to-the-brim with wishful thinking, but it is a gentle mankind’s utter failure to communicate with itself. He reminder that what we all have in common in this life is saw global conflict as the macrocosm of something only the experience of each other. The play is a call for a return too familiar at home; of something ‘whole’ instinctively to a deeper sense of ourselves in relation to each other. trying to tear itself apart. As evidence, there was the class The idea that you can’t have a self, without another to system in England that had survived by adapting itself illuminate and foster it, I think still rings true. into various shades of bigotry ever since the feudal days. Another major influence on Priestley and his There was the growing brashness of the Industrial Age, plays was that of John William Dunne (1875-1949). where human beings were deemed naturally subservient Dunne was interested in the nature of time. Through to the exploding quotas needed to furnish the country years of experimentation with precognitive dreams and with modern mechanisms; from household appliances hypnagogic states, Dunne posited that our experience of to even more complicated weapons of mass destruction time as linear, something that had a beginning, a middle (presumably with which, future wars would be fought). and an end, was an illusion brought about by human

12 Shaw Magazine / Spring 2008 consciousness. Dunne argued that past, present and J.B. Priestley at The Shaw: Anthony Bekenn, Goldie Semple and Allan Gray in EDEN END, 1994; Marion Gilsenan, Barry MacGregor and Tony future were in fact simultaneous and only experienced van Bridge in AN INSPECTOR CALLS, 1989; Graham Harley and Jack sequentially because of our mental perception of them. Medley in WHEN WE ARE MARRIED, 1990; Peter Hutt, Wendy Noel and Sharry Flett in DANGEROUS CORNER, 1988 (photos by David Cooper). In this play an entire family’s concept of time Below: J.B. Priestley departing for New York on the Queen Mary is telescoped back through their separate pasts and boat-train from Waterloo Station, September 1937 (Hulton Getty Picture Collection). multiple actions to create (unbeknownst to them) the single collective-action of the ruination of a young factory girl. Through the interrogation process of a mysterious interloper (the Inspector), each member of the family is brought face to face with the reality of how their callousness and bigotry created the most horrible kind of damage. In the end of course, the First and Second World Wars did occur, and just as the Birling family is unable to admit to themselves the neccessity of change within and without themselves, so does the world. Although the conclusion Priestley reaches about the human state is rather painful and sombre, the piece itself crackles with energy and wit and insight. H.G. Wells was one of Priestley’s favorite writers; in fact Priestley spoke the eulogy for the famous writer when he died in 1946. Wells left us with a quote that Priestley was to make much of in the years that followed: “The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the things we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.”

“TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST ARE BOTH PERHAPS PRESENT IN TIME FUTURE, AND TIME FUTURE CONTAINED IN TIME PAST.”—T.S. ELIOT

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