Priestly's Political Message in "An Inspector Calls"

The play "An Inspector Calls" was written by J.B Priestley in 1945, when the British people were recovering from over six years of constant warfare and danger. As a result of two world wars, class distinctions were greatly reduced and women had achieved a much higher place in society. It was due to this and a great desire for social change that Labour's Clement Attlee won a landslide victory over the conservative Winston Churchill. He nationalized the gas steel and electrical industries, established the NHS and introduced the Welfare State. The play was set in Brumley, a fictional industrial city, in 1912.The playwright believed passionately in the left wing perspective and his message is overtly political. He uses techniques such as "dramatic irony" and "direct mouthpieces", which define the genre of the play as non-illusory, to impart his left-wing message.

In order to encourage the audience to apply their critical faculties, Priestley makes them feel superior to Birling.He thoroughly discredits and degrades Birling, and through him, the right wing philosophy. This tells us very early on that Priestley uses Birling as a diametric mouthpiece to voice his left-wing opinions and that the play is completely biased to the socialist perspective. The theatricality of the dramatic irony Priestley uses makes the audience think outside the proscenium arch, about the world and their relationships to it. This is all part of the non-illusory experience.

Birling is presented as a self-centred capitalist very early on in the play. His pleasure in the marriage of his daughter is purely for his own profit. "Now you've brought us together and perhaps we may look forward to a time when Crofts and Birling are no longer competing but are worki...

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...provide the hope in the play that the younger generation will carry on the future responsibly. Sheila and Eric are better than their parents, who are too set in their ways.

The play is very simplistic and overtly political. It heavily features varying aspects of non-illusory theatre to semaphor Priestley's political message. When reading the play, it is important to remember that the characters are not people but caricatures Priestley employs to manipulate the reader. This combines with the artificiality of the plot to form a completely biased play, from whichever angle one looks at it. However at the time of its publication it was not so outlandish, because it upheld the New Labour government, struggling so hard to bring about its reforms and stay in favour of a people who had suffered many hardships and were now looking to more years of difficulty and discomfort.