A whole new gen­er­a­tion of kids study­ing GCSE Eng­lish are dis­cov­er­ing J B Priestley’s 1945 play, An Inspec­tor Calls. It seems to be every­where at the moment: as well as being on the syl­labus in schools, the Nation­al Theatre’s pro­duc­tion of the play was doing the rounds again nation­al­ly when the lock­down hit. Sad­ly, I just missed out on that, hav­ing seen the poster too late, but I did find a DVD of the 1954 film for a quid in a char­i­ty shop, and snapped it up.

You may well be famil­iar with the sto­ry: set in 1912 in a well-to-do north­ern Mid­lands house­hold, in a soci­ety divid­ed by class dis­tinc­tion, we find the Bir­ling fam­i­ly assem­bled in cel­e­bra­tion of their daugh­ter Sheila’s engage­ment to Ger­ald Croft. The patri­arch, Arthur Bir­ling, is feel­ing pleased with him­self, as his busi­ness is doing well and he is on an upward social tra­jec­to­ry, improved even more by the social stand­ing of the Croft fam­i­ly into which Sheila is mar­ry­ing. Their evening, how­ev­er, is inter­rupt­ed by the arrival of Inspec­tor Goole (“Poole” in the film ver­sion).

The Inspec­tor, played mas­ter­ful­ly by Alis­tair Sim in the 1954 film, has some ques­tions for all the mem­bers of the fam­i­ly and Ger­ald Croft, in turn, con­cern­ing a girl who has just com­mit­ted sui­cide in the gris­ly man­ner of drink­ing bleach, a sign of her des­per­ate men­tal state. It becomes appar­ent that each per­son has had some involve­ment with this poor girl, albeit in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, and each has played some part in her descent and degra­da­tion. The unfold­ing of the sto­ry­line is sub­tle and we the audi­ence are grad­u­al­ly drawn in as details are revealed and it dawns on us that every­one present has some con­nec­tion.

Telling­ly, the char­ac­ters react dif­fer­ent­ly to Inspec­tor Goole’s rev­e­la­tions. The old­er ones refuse to accept their respon­si­bil­i­ty; the younger ones — Sheila in par­tic­u­lar — approach an epiphany. Priest­ley lays bare the self-impor­tance of the old­er gen­er­a­tion of the Bir­lings with­out flinch­ing. It is a bril­liant decon­struc­tion of the human con­di­tion.

Here is Alis­tair Sim (bet­ter known per­haps for his cross-dress­ing com­e­dy per­for­mances in the St Trini­an’s movies) in a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly com­pelling scene from the film.