An Inspector Calls – 5/5
This is nice little disturbing play about class consciousness. A well-off family is about to sit down to dinner one evening when a knock on their door reveals a a police inspector asking to interview the family. When they ask him what it’s about he’s a little coy, for reasons that become clear later, and he explains that a girl (young woman) has been found dead of suicide and he wants to investigate her death. The father of the family, a factory owner, is first to ask about it and he’s given a name and shown a picture (no one else is allowed to see that picture). He recognizes the woman as a former employee who lead a walkout of sorts demanding a raise. The walkout did not lead to raises, but the woman and the other leaders were summarily fired. This piggybacks on a conversation in the first scene about workers and rights that the family happened to be having.
Next, the daughter in the family asks a question and it’s revealed that the woman then took a job at a department store, where the daughter had in the last year demanded she be fired for “laughing” at her, exercising that little bit of power. Then it turns out that the daughter’s fiancé paid to place the woman in an apartment….and things occurred, and then the son, a drunken reveler seems to perhaps have gotten her pregnant and given her stolen money. So what next? She happens to have been turned away from the home for wayward girls by the mother. A lot of responsibility in just one family. The inspector, his questions answered, leaves telling them he’ll be back.
When he leaves the family begins arguing left and right about what’s right and proper, and a phone call to the local infirmary confirms what the father believes to be true, that no one has turned up dead that day……but the play has a little more for us.
Class consciousness! Class warfare! It’s wild to me how the internal divisions of pretty much every country for the last 100 years involves whether or not you’re allowed to completely and utterly exploit others, and what the state might or might not do about it.
Dangerous Corner – 4/5
Apparently JB Priestley at some point read a book called An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne. This book suggests that time is…well a flat circle and that one can have precognitive dreams of future events and that that can lead one to make different choices at certain crossroads. I don’t know how trippy the book itself is as I haven’t read it. I also don’t know what influence it had on Priestley’s actual life, but he definite wrote a handful of plays in which this convention is at work. In one of them, he even almost mentions the book by name, only by reference.
In this play, we begin with several women listening to a radio play and there’s a gunshot, indicating that one of the characters has shot himself. The several women begin discussing the play intensely. It’s a sort of weekend away, and the conversation about the play leads the women to discuss the idea of “truth” meaning, if you know something, what kind of responsibility do you have to share it if it will cause pain. In the previous year there was an incident at the publishing firm where most of the women’s husbands work and one woman, a writer, is published. It seems that one of the brothers-in-law was implicated in the theft of an amount of money and this led to his suicide. The play goes from there.
The title of the play is about those afore mentioned crossroads. “There’s corners in life” and you never know what’s around the next one kind of thing. I won’t say much more about the plot because it’s rather intricately plotted ultimately.
I’ve Been Here Before – 3/5
This is another of the time plays like Dangerous Corner, where characters become aware of future possibilities based on present choices being made. We’re at a country inn and a couple has walked in. The couple is a well-off and well-known couple who plan on starting a school together. But there seems to be some significant tension between them. Another guest, a German professor, begins to ask them questions and eventually corners the man on his own and asks more and more probing questions about life and death. He eventually asks him whether he has a gun. The man startled, says yes, he has one in his car.
Another guest at the inn also notices the couple and takes some kind of fancy for the wife. They hit it off, but a strange energy, beyond attraction seems to permeate their connection, a sense of deja vu. The German professor tells them that he is a physicist and has stumbled upon what he believes is a vision of the future. They will plan to run off together and that this will destroy both their lives and lead to the suicide of the woman’s husband. The play goes from there.
Of the three time plays, I found this one the least convincing. Relying too heavily on the actual theory itself (which is bullshit obviously) means that what could be very good about the play relies too heavily on belief, landing very squarely in twilight zone terriory.
Time and the Conways – 4/5 Stars
This play is another of the time plays and the one that puts the concept into the best situation. There’s very little said about the theory and nothing too crazy happens. It just imagines the theory in practice.
The Conways are an ebullient family, despite the recent death of their father, a man who suddenly drowned. It’s right near the end of WWI and they’re awaiting the oldest son’s return. It’s a get together and they’re playing the old family games, having the old family squabbles, and the old family dramas. Two figure not in the family are also there. One, a family friend who is clearly in love with one of the daughters, and another man, a friend from the war of the brother who returns this night, with the awful name of Ernest Beavers (and he deserves it).
The second act is twenty years in the future. The family is not in the worst of situations, but several bad choices have led to disastrous personal lives and sad interactions. There’s a sense of loss at what might have been.
In act three, the daughter Kay, whose birthday it had been in act one, has awoken and realized that act two was a dream. This leads her to press certain issues more that were unspoken in act one.