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An Inspector Calls: Context. JB Priestley, 1894-1984. How much money proportionally should the maker of a pair of Nikes earn?. Responsibility and Morality. Your Truthful Actions. You see two primary aged children shoving another child against the wall. Do you:
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An Inspector Calls: Context JB Priestley, 1894-1984
How much money proportionally should the maker of a pair of Nikes earn?
Your Truthful Actions • You see two primary aged children shoving another child against the wall. Do you: • Ignore them because you don’t know what’s going on • Go up to them and try to stop the fight before it starts • Tell an adult that you think a young child is about to be beaten up • Someone who doesn’t speak English gets on a bus and tries to ask the driver if it goes to the hospital. The driver is impatient and can’t be bothered. Do you: • Push past the person, beep your oyster card and get on • Tell the driver he wants to go to the hospital • Speak to the person and reassure him it’s the right bus.
Your Truthful Actions 3. An old person falls down in the street. Do you: • Pass by because you are in a hurry • Rush to help them • Slow down so that someone will help first 4. A beggar asks you for money outside the station. Do you: • Ignore them because you disapprove of begging • Apologise for having no change • Pass by as you’re in a hurry 5. Members of the class openly take money you’ve been fundraising for a charity. Do you: a) do nothing b) try to persuade them to put it back c) tell an adult in the hope that it will be dealt by them.
JB Priestley Biography • Left school at 16: “I believed that [experience of] the world outside the classrooms and labs would help me to become a writer.” • 1911-14: formative years, associates did not do the ‘social chit chat’ but rather discussed ‘real talk and hot argument’ • Called up 1914-19, front line service: experience of war summed up by two key points—narrowly surviving a German shell; being the victim of a gas attack • Went to university after WW1: began writing novels, then plays: ‘to prove that a man might produce long novels yet be able to write effectively, using the strictest economy, for the stage’ • 2 themes recur in his plays: the effects of an individuals actions over a period of time; the Collective and Individual responsibility for actions and their consequences. • Had a radio show reflecting on WW2 conditions, but were cancelled for his being too critical of the government
What is Socialism? “The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.” The Socialist party of Great Britain
Contemporary Theatre in the 1940s • Before WW2 theatres were very popular. • Since the introduction of cinemas, theatres had been competing with musicals with lavish sets, costumes and budgets. • With the coming of WW2, theatres opened and closed erratically due to air raids. • Performances were relocated to the North or the Midlands. • By 1944 the Old Vic Theatre Company had returned to London and the play was first staged in 1946.
TWO KEY DATES 1912 1945 The date that the play was written. Post-war ennui: egocentric tension of the people, concentrate on their own business. Dramatic Irony from the start: audience looking back from the vantage point of time • The date that the play was set in: Edwardian England. • Huge social divisions and distinctions • A year of key traumatic events • Suffragette movements: Repeated introduction of woman’s suffrage bills to parlt defeated between 1896-1911, militant campaign by Emmeline Pankhurst since 1906
1912: Arthur Birling’s England • Huge social divisions and distinctions • ‘class divisions were never so acutely felt as by the Edwardians’ • Income, wealth, and living standards • 87: 5 (w) • 7000: 4/5 (L) • U/MC – 5: 6,000,000 • WC – 39 million: 1/3 (nat inc) • 8 million people had to get by on less than 25 shillings a week (£1.25): as a result they were ‘underfed, under-housed and insufficiently clothed.... Their growth is stunted, their mental powers are cramped, their health undermined.’ • Female workers near the bottom of the pile
OR... “It was the golden age of the country weekend, of the London season, of the new business tycoons, of the Gaiety girls (who sometimes married not tycoons but aristocrats), of the bustle and of the top hat, but, above all, of the golden sovereign.”
The end of an ‘age of innocence’. Death, the great equaliser, came to all classes – 1st, 2nd or 3rd – aboard the Titanic.
‘These silly little war scares’ • 1905-14: England in costly arms race with Germany, increasing likelihood of war: over 40 new battleships (dreadnoughts) commissioned and constructed, costing each year between £31-45 million. • £229 million spent in 6 years: half of this would have cured the country’s social problems.
Industrialisation • Such mass industrialisation led to the potential (and reality) of massive fortunes for those who have the abilities to get it: manufacturing trades, etc.
‘lower costs and higher prices’ • However, the period leading up to 1912 was blighted by increasing industrial unrest, known as the Great Unrest
Population Expansion • Birlings live in Brumley, N. Midlands (trad. Set in Yorkshire): mighty industrial heartlands, rampantly hypocritical, unjust and depressing. • Huge housing pressure: wealth moved out of centres, poor crammed into nack to back houses or long terraces, insanitary overcrowding, smoke, filth, poor public health, massively reduced life expectancy.
Breakout of War 1914-19 • Few foresaw what was a localised conflict with the Balkans to turn into all-out slaughter • Grateful to prove their chance in battle: Rupert Brooke, ‘God be thanked that he hath matched us with the hour’. • It should have been over by Christmas
‘I noticed... a present for any good child called Jolliboy II Quick-firing Machine Gun (See How Quickly Pellets Are Ejected), and as I walked away I hoped that the jolly boys who played with it would never find themselves caught in the barbed wire with a stream of hot lead disembowelling them. The people who sell that toy might be encouraged to give away with it a few photographs showing what its parent toy can do to a man’s guts.’ (Priestly, An English Journey)
Post-War Britain: Rebuilding Britain • How? Radical ideas voiced: redistribution of wealth, common ownership of industries and resources, health and welfare, long term security • Trying to solve the problems of unrestrained capitalism, self-interest, a lack of understanding of how society inter-connects • Priestly did not want to see a return to the values of 1912 or 1930s where the moneyed classes ruled and working people received little recognition • → Post-war welfare state. Labour’s famous landslide victory of 1945, Attlee ousting Churchill: physical, social, political reconstruction
Reading a Dramatic text • The Language of Drama.Accent, intonation, emphasis and tone of the words, dialogue, dramatic speeches. How does that compare to how it is written down on the page? Stage directions, etc... • Characters.Characters are figures within a drama text created by a writer through words and actions. Should the aim be to identify with the characters and perceive them as real human beings within a real life situation, or to retain distance and avoid empathising with the unreal characters and their dramatic situation as that would be giving into the manipulation of the dramatist? • Theatrical Language. Pertaining to the language necessary for performing a play in the theatre and the use of theatrical space, theatrical technology and the visual aspects of a performance: music, sounds the characters make (whistling), gestures, actions and props. The scenery, the objects that decorate the set, sound effects, music, props, all communicate meaning in the medium of theatre, as do the clothes characters wear, their general appearance, the style in which the action is lit by the person in charge of lighting and the use of theatrical space. All this non-verbal meaning is communication through a combination of all these aspects of performance in a theatre.
Sub-Text. That which exists beneath the layer of overt meaning produced by the words the characters are given to speak. What is not being said becomes the real meaning of the exchange of words. • Privileging the Dramatist. There is inherent value in viewing plays within the social, historical and cultural framework of the time they were written and performed. We could privilege the dramatist, attempting to seek those certain, specific ideas that the dramatist could have intended on communicating through the written text. • Theatrical Genres. Genre is a conventional play type, a common kind of drama with its own conventions of theme, characters, settings, language and style. The dramatist can follow the conventions of the genre or they can subvert them in some way to create unexpected variations in the conventions of genre: this could be done by reversing familiar characterisations (making the villain the most interesting character) or changing conventional narrative patterns (substituting an unhappy ending for a happy ending).
Naturalism: It is a more extreme form of realism, attempting to put real life on stage. There are clearly defined plots, climaxes and resolutions of social problems that are represented. Naturalism does not obey conventional plotting and resolution, because life does not obey such well ordered rules. It is an attempt to put a ‘slice of life’ on stage. • Verfremdungseffekt: the destruction of an audience’s ‘suspension of disbelief’ by deliberately reminding audiences that what they are watching is not reality, but a performance representing a view of reality, that the dramatic situations and characters are not real. Techniques involve direct audience address, stepping outside character, etc: audiences are not invited to empathise emotionally, but to rather make a more considered judgement of what is being shown to them.
