An Inspector Calls - Themes - CCEA

Carl: Hello, and welcome to the Bitesize English literature podcast. If you want to hear all the episodes in this podcast, make sure you download the BBC Sounds app.

Jean: In the BBC Sounds app, there's loads of other things you can use to help you with your revision. Full versions of some of the text you might be studying, revision playlists and other Bitesize podcast series to help with different GCSE subjects.

It’s important to let you know that in this podcast, there will be discussions of suicide and sexual abuse.

Carl: In this series, we're going all the way back to 1912 and into a fictional town in the Midlands called Brumley to explore JB Priestley's play An Inspector Calls.

Jean: I’m Jean Menzies, an author and ancient historian.

Carl: I'm Carl Anka, an author and journalist.

Jean: In this episode, we're going to be looking at England during the time An Inspector Calls was written.

Carl: The interesting thing to note about An inspector Calls is that while the story is set in 1912, it was written over 30 years later and was first performed in 1945. The setting is a lot different to the world in which Priestley wrote in.

Jean: What happened in 1912?

Carl: The United Kingdom was just coming out of the Victorian era, women in didn't have the right to vote yet. And while there had been some reforms for people living in poverty, Britain was still a pretty individualistic society. So people just looked after themselves and their families and there wasn't really a strong sense of social responsibility. The government wasn't doing much to help people in need.

Jean: You can see the values of that era reflected in the characters.

Carl: The Birlings are somewhere between middle class and upper class. They're a family that has beautiful candlelit dinners, talk about business and politics, but you get the sense that their lives aren't that affected by the world around them. In fact, let's step back into their family dinner to find out more.

Extract:
Sheila: Yes, go on, mummy. You must drink our health.
Mrs Birling:(smiling) Very well, then. Just a little, thank you.* (to Edna, who is about to go, with tray.)* all right, Edna. I'll ring from the drawing room when we want coffee. Probably in about half an hour.
Edna:(going) Yes, ma'am. (Edna goes out. They now have all the glasses filled. Birling beams at them and clearly relaxes.)
Birling: Well, well – this is very nice. Very nice. Good dinner too, Sybil. Tell cook from me.
Gerald:(politely) Absolutely first class.

Jean: So they seem pretty content and relaxed.

Carl: Yes, they are. It's 1912 and it's a good time to be in business. There's stuff going on in the background of the Birlings’ lives like labour reforms and rumours about the First World War. But the Birlings themselves are not too concerned because they believe that their wealth protects them from the harsh realities of the world. Unlike Eva.

Extract:
Birling: …And we're in for a time of steadily increasing prosperity.
Gerald: I believe you're right, sir.
Birling: …Now you three young people, just listen to this – and remember what I’m telling you now. In twenty or thirty year's time – let's say, in 1940 – you may be giving a little party like this – your son or daughter might be getting engaged – and I tell you, by that time you'll be living in a world that'll have forgotten all these capital versus labour agitations…

Carl: World War One started in 1914, two years after Mr Birling called the idea of war “fiddle sticks,” which is a good example of what is known as dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something that the characters don't. Another good example of dramatic irony is where Mr Birling describes an exciting new ship that's just been built as “unsinkable.” And that ship would go on to be the Titanic, which of course would go on to sink in the spring of 1912, on a voyage between the United Kingdom and New York.

Jean: Priestley uses dramatic irony to discredit Mr Birling’s views and by extension, the type of man that he represents. Priestley is basically telling us that old businessmen who think they know everything, actually don't.

Carl: This irony is enhanced when Mr Birling calls his children “the famous younger generation who know it all.”

Jean: The play is set in 1912. But it was written and first performed much later in 1945, and a lot had changed by then.

Jean: In 1945, Britain was a whole different country to what it had been in 1912. The country had gone through World War One and World War Two. Two wars that changed so much about British society.

Carl: When men left to fight the wars, women stepped in to do the work needed to keep the country afloat during the wars which led them to win the right to vote.

Jean: Then the government created laws and reforms to look after people living in poverty, which helped them get better access to healthcare, gave them support while trying to find a job and made it so that they had better living conditions. That's when the NHS was invented.

Carl: It completely changed the class structure.

Jean: During the war, everyone, both rich and poor had to ration food and clothes. There was a bit of a black market, that meant some people had access to luxury goods. But generally all the classes were eating and dressing the same.

Carl: They were also fighting side by side. And so the class barriers that had existed in 1912 started to break down, not totally, but just a little bit. Let's fast-forward to when the play was first performed.

Jean: By 1945, there were more British women in the workplace, and there was more movement when it came to people going up and down from working to middle class.

Carl: So when the audience of 1945 went to the theatre, to see Inspector Calls for the first time, it must have felt like going back in time a little bit.

Jean: It was 30 years later. The values and social structures had changed a lot. That's why Priestley set the play in the past.

Carl: The characters in the play had no idea about how much the world would change. So Priestley uses them to make important points about what life used to look like to remind the audience how important it is not to go back to old ways, and how they acted back then, in the 1910s.

Extract:
Inspector: …Well, Eva Smith's gone. You can't do her any more harm. And you can't do her any good now, either. You can't even say “I'm sorry, Eva Smith.”
Sheila:(who is crying quietly) That's the worst of it.
Inspector: But just remember this. One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other…

Jean: So the play is like a reminder to keep looking after each other because life could be so much worse for the Eva Smiths of the world, if people forget what they learned during the wars. It's a story about how caring for one another and having a sense of social responsibility benefits everyone.

Carl: That's right. Priestley uses characters like Mr Birling to show the audience what middle class snobbery and ignorance looked like before the World Wars. And to highlight just how cold and thoughtless that behaviour was, and in fact still is right up to the modern day.

Extract:
Birling: …But the way some of these cranks talk and write now, you'd think everybody has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up together like bees in a hive – community and all that nonsense…

Jean: That speech would have sounded ridiculous to a post war audience, because they’d just seen how important it was to look after each other during the war.

Carl: At the end of the play, they're not the same versions of themselves that they were at the start of this dinner. At least Sheila, Eric and Gerald aren’t. These characters had an experience that changed them.

Jean: The audience who had been around before the war, and then lived through the war up until 1945, would have felt the same way. They weren't the same people they had been before the war had changed every part of their lives.

Carl: That's one of the key reasons that Priestley set the play in the past. To contrast the values of 1912 when compared to the values 1945. JB Priestley was a social commentator, which means he wrote stories that commented on the politics and society around him.

Jean: He was also a socialist, which means that he believed that things like health care, housing and welfare should be managed by the government in order to do the best for the most people.

Carl: Things like the NHS and state schools are run by the government.

Jean: Although the NHS wasn't founded until a couple of years after the play was written. Priestley believed that it was everybody's responsibility to help the most disadvantaged people in society, and that was something he campaigned for in his own life.

Carl: He's the opposite of Mr Birling. Remember that speech Mr Birling gave at the start of the play to remind the audience of what life was like in 1912. By the end of it, Eric has learned just how wrong his father is.

Extract:
Eric: Yes, and do you remember what you said to Gerald and me after dinner, when you were feeling so pleased with yourself? You told us that a man has to make his own way, look after himself and mind his own business, and that we weren't to take any notice of these cranks who tell us that everybody has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up together. Do you remember? Yes – and then one of those cranks walked in – the Inspector. (laughs bitterly.) I didn't notice you told him that it's every man for himself.

Carl: It's like Priestley started the play with that speech so he could spend the rest of the play proving just how wrong Mr. Birling was. This is something known as straw man fallacy or a straw man argument. You take another person's argument or point of view, and then you distort it and exaggerate it in some sort of extreme way to create what is known as a straw man. And then you go on to attack that extreme distortion as if that's really the claim the first person was making.

Jean: The play is Priestley's way of encouraging the audience of 1945 to put the lessons they learned in the war into practice, so they can build a better, more caring society.

Carl: While it cannot be described as a hopeful play, by the end of it, you get a sense that at least some of the characters within it, have begun to learn their lesson. Maybe the audience will too.

Carl: In the next episode, we will be doing a recap quiz to test just how much you learned.

Jean: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Bitesize English literature podcast. Don't forget you can listen back to this or any of the episodes at any time to help your revision on BBC Sounds.

An Inspector Calls sounds like one of those murder mysteries that your nan watches on a Sunday afternoon. But it's not. JB Priestley wanted to write a play revealing what he saw as society's faults, and encouraging people to take responsibility for them.

Which brings us to one of the play's central themes, you guessed it, responsibility.

The play explores personal responsibility - what you get up to - and collective responsibility - what society gets up to. Priestley is interested in the effect of class, age and sex on people's attitudes to responsibility, and shows how prejudice can prevent people from acting responsibly.

Now, the words "responsible" and "responsibility" are used by most characters at some point in the play. This isn't because Priestley couldn't find a thesaurus, but it's because he's giving us the clue as to what the play is about.

The inspector wants each member of the family to share responsibility for Eva's death. This is personal responsibility.

The inspector's also talking to the audience, and telling them about collective responsibility. So just like the characters are all somehow linked to Eva Smith's death, everyone in society is also linked, a bit like sausages. You know, they're linked too.

And so people should just stop thinking of themselves, and start trying to help those around them. It's probably not a coincidence that Priestley had the same left-wing political views as the inspector.

Near to the time the play was written, the world had watched as workers in Russia overthrew factory owners like Arthur Birling, and installed a Communist government.

So which class does Eva belong to?

Eva was working class.

There's only one character we actually see who comes from the lower classes - Edna. All the rest are either wannabe upper class - we've all met them before - like the snooty Birling family, or actually upper class, like Gerald.

But we hear plenty about the lower classes as the inspector guides us through Eva's life, and shows us how each member of the family treated her.

Mr Birling wants to be upper class so badly that he can actually taste it. All that time that Eva worked at his factory, all he saw in her was cheap labour. Bad.

Both Gerald and Eric used Eva. To Gerald, she was a mistress who was disposed of. To Eric, Eva was easy sex at the end of a drunken night.

Mrs Birling and her daughter Sheila both disliked poor Eva. Sheila caught Eva smirking at her, and so had her fired from her job. Mrs Birling refused to help her when she came asking for money.

What Priestley was trying to show was that the upper classes only have such easy lives because of all the hard work the lower classes have to do.

When the play was written, women were second-class citizens. They didn't have the same rights as men and couldn't even vote. These were the days before Germaine Greer and Girls Aloud.

If you were an upper class woman, in most cases the best you could hope for was to marry a rich man. If you were working class, you needed a job. That's why you called it working class.

Some of the characters are not very sympathetic towards wonmen. Mr Birling says that if women in his factory don't like it, they can go elsewhere.

Gerald doesn't see Eva as a vulnerable young girl, but as someone he could amuse himself with for a while.

Another major theme is age - the younger generation versus the older generation. T4 versus Newsnight or Tess Daly versus Bruce Forsyth. More accurately, Eric and Sheila Birling versus their parents.

Each group deals with Eva's death in a different way. The younger characters feels guilty about her while their parents refuse to admit they did anything wrong.

Eric and Sheila are much more open to new ideas like when they're sympathetic to the workers on strike. The elder Birlings will do anything to hide from the truth.

Mr Birling lies to the inspector about having met the girl, while Mrs Birling wants to cover up their involvement as much as possible.

The children seem more able to admit their faults. Eric, for example, refuses to cover up the truth, saying it wouldn't change what he did.

We're not sure of Gerald Croft's age, but in the end he sides with Mr and Mrs Birling. This is maybe because he's from the upper classes - the group with the most to lose if the poor had more power.

Carl: Hello, and welcome to the Bitesize English literature podcast. If you want to hear all the episodes in this podcast, make sure you download the BBC Sounds app.

Jean: In the BBC Sounds app, there's loads of other things you can use to help you with your revision. Full versions of some of the text you might be studying, revision playlists and other Bitesize podcast series to help with different GCSE subjects.

It’s important to let you know that in this podcast, there will be discussions of suicide and sexual abuse.

Carl: In this series, we're going all the way back to 1912 and into a fictional town in the Midlands called Brumley to explore JB Priestley's play An Inspector Calls.

Jean: I’m Jean Menzies, an author and ancient historian.

Carl: I'm Carl Anka, an author and journalist.

Jean: In this episode, we're going to be looking at the main themes of An Inspector Calls.

Jean: You can immediately tell that the Birlings belong to the upper-middle class, as soon as the play begins.

Carl: Yes, they are all wearing fancy dinner outfits, and the men are wearing white tie suits with tails. White tie is even more formal dress than black tie. Tails refers to the rear of the suit, which is often pointed.

Jean: I love to get dressed up as much as the next person but I'm not sure I could imagine putting on all these fancy suits and adornments just to have dinner my own house.

Carl: Indeed, it was different time and place and what people wore to dinner symbolised their social classes. When audiences watched the play for the first time, in 1945, they were living in a version of Britain that had just experienced two world wars. Everyone had to ration and look out for each other. So we got to the point where both rich people and poor people were eating the same meals, dressing in the same clothes and spending time in the same places. It was an equaliser.

Jean: It was an equaliser to an extent, but there was a black market and rich people still had advantages, of course.

Jean: The play is set in 1912, a few years before World War One. Before the wars Britain was strongly divided by class. The middle class was made up of wealthy people like the Birlings who owned land and factories. And then the working class were people like Eva Smith, who worked in those same factories. So Priestley wanted to show what life was like when people in different classes lived really differently and to caution about going back to those ways.

Carl: He also wanted to highlight how the upper classes look down on the working classes, and to show the unfairness of it all. You can really see it in the way that Mr And Mrs Birling talk. You can see what Mrs Birling said about Eva here:

Extract:
Mrs Birling: Whatever it was, I know it made me finally lose all patience with her. She was giving herself ridiculous airs. She was claiming elaborate fine feelings and scruples that were simply absurd in a girl in her position.

Inspector:(very sternly) Her position now is that she lies with a burnt-out inside on a slab. (As Birling tries to protest, turns on him.) Don't stammer and yammer at me again, man. I'm losing all patience with you people. What did she say?

Mrs Birling:(rather cowed) she said that the father was only a youngster – silly and wild and drinking too much. There couldn't be any question of marrying him – it would be wrong for them both. He had given her money but she didn't want to take any more money from him.

Inspector: why didn't she want to take and more money from him?

Mrs Birling: all a lot of nonsense – I didn't believe a word of it.

Inspector: I'm not asking you if you believed it. I want to know what she said. Why didn't she want to take any more money from this boy?

Mrs Birling: Oh – she had some fancy reason. As if a girl of that sort would ever refuse money!

Carl: Mrs Birling completely refused to believe Eva's story about not wanting to take the baby’s father's money, because she was poor. Why would you ever think about things such as morals when there's money on the line?

Jean: Mrs Birling thought that a girl of that sort wouldn’t dare to refuse stolen money because she thinks that working class people don't have the same moral values as her, so Mrs Birling refuses to help Eva. The play encourages us to sympathise with Eva and highlights the unfairness of the class system that it puts the vulnerable at even more of a disadvantage.

Carl: Mr Birling isn't much better when the workers at his factory go on strike for fair wages. He just sacks the ringleaders and then gets the others that come back for the same poor pay.

Extract:
Birling: Right, Gerald. They mostly were. And so was the strike, after a week or two. Pitiful affair. Well, we let them all come back – at the old rates – except the four or five ring-leaders, who'd started the trouble. I went down myself and told them to clear out. And this girl. Eva Smith, was one of them, she'd had a lot to say – far too much – so she had to go.

Gerald: You couldn't have done anything else.

Eric: He could. He could have kept her on instead of throwing her out. I call it tough luck.

Jean: This extract takes us right onto our next theme, which is social responsibility.

Carl: Yes, that old thing that Mr Birling doesn't really believe in.

Jean: Social responsibility is the idea that we all have a role to play when it comes to looking after each other, especially the most vulnerable and at-risk people in society. An Inspector Calls was first performed in the UK just after the end of World War Two. Life after the war was really difficult.

Carl: Priestley wanted to highlight the importance of social responsibility by reminding the audience of what the world would be like without it. A lot of people had health conditions and couldn't afford to go to the hospital. Some people had lost their jobs and didn’t have enough money to rent out somewhere else to live. And many people couldn't really afford to buy food or look after themselves and their families.

Jean: People just like Eva.

Extract:
Inspector: That doesn't make it any the less yours. She came to you for help, at a time when no woman could have needed it more. And you not only refused it yourself but saw to it that the others refused it too. She was here alone, friendless, almost penniless, desperate. She needed not only money but advice, sympathy, friendliness. You've had children. You must have known what she was feeling. And you slammed the door in her face.

Carl: For Eva, losing a job sets off a domino effect. That meant she didn't have a safe place to stay, or enough money to look after her baby. All this was caused by a member of the Birling family.

Jean: JB Priestley believed that if people were considerate and cared more about the people in their community, it would improve everybody's quality of life.

Carl: So he wrote this play to encourage the audience to be more socially responsible. Inspector Goole is the main voice of social responsibility in the play.

Extract:
Inspector: …We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other…

Jean: Some would argue that Inspector Goole is a stand in for the voice of JB Priestley, who says everything that Priestley wants the audience to hear.

Carl: On the opposite side, playing the main voices against social responsibility are Mr And Mrs Birling?

Jean: Mr Birling started the domino effect and Mrs Birling ended it Mr and Mrs Birling never accepted responsibility for the effect their actions had on Eva.

Extract:
Mrs Birling: I'm sorry she should have come to such a horrible end. But I accept no blame for it at all.\

Inspector: who is to blame then?\

Mrs Birling: first, the girl herself.

Carl: Well, what a great quote about social responsibility because Mrs Birling takes absolutely no responsibility.

Jean: We talked about it in the last episode, but there's a real divide between the Birling parents and their children when it comes to taking responsibility for their actions. Now this takes us to the next theme of the play: age.

Carl: Mr and Mrs Birling are from the older generation. They just believe that everyone had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just get on with things, don't fuss, don't dwell, just get on and do the work. They don't have the same kind of empathy for Eva Smith that their kids do.

Extract:
Birling:(pointing to Eric and Sheila) Now look at the pair of them – the famous younger generation who know it all. And they can't even take a joke-

Carl: The Birling parents are pretty stubborn in their beliefs, whereas the younger Birlings are much more willing to learn and change their perspective.

Extract:
Eric: Whoever that chap was, the fact remains that I did what I did. And mother did what she did. And the rest of you did what you did to her…

Sheila: And Eric's absolutely right. And it's the best thing any one of us has said tonight and it makes me feel a bit less ashamed of us. You're just beginning to pretend all over again.

Jean: Priestley had hopes in the younger generation’s ability to learn and change, which you can see in the way that both Sheila and Eric seem to grow up over the course of the play, to take responsibility for their actions.

Carl: And then try to get the parents to take responsibility for theirs.

Jean: They're younger and more open to the lessons the inspector’s teaching them because they accept their mistakes. The younger Birlings offer the chance for a brighter future.

Carl: Eric still did some pretty terrible things. But at the end the play, even though she and Eric understand they can't undo the damage they've done, you finish with a sense of hope that both Sheila and Eric will leave the dinner party and try to become better people. Because the things the inspector has said have changed both of them.

Jean: Fingers crossed. Now, the final theme.

Carl: Yes, the final theme of the play is gender. So we know that An Inspector Calls was written after World War Two. At that time, many British men had left their homes and their towns to go and fight during the war. Women had to step in to fill the jobs that men usually did.

Jean: Like working in factories, mechanics, business and manual labour. Women did a good job which changed the perspective of what a woman's role in society is. Some people realised that women could be more than mothers, wives and homemakers. So with that new-found freedom, women were able to make their own money and look after themselves.

Carl: But the play is set before both wars. Many people had quite traditional views on gender. We can see that in the way that Mr Birling and Gerald talk.

Jean: Gerald says he hates hard faced women showing how superficial he can be when it comes to how he sees women. And Mr Birling talks about women wearing certain clothes as a sign of self-respect, suggesting that women who dress differently don't respect themselves, which is just a little bit sexist.

Extract:
Eric:(sitting down) Yes, please. (takes decanter and helps himself.) Mother says we mustn't stay too long. But I don't think it matters. I left'em talking about clothes again. You'd think a girl had never any clothes before she gets married. Women are potty about 'em.

Birling: Yes, but you've got to remember, my boy, that clothes mean something quite different to a woman. Not just something to wear – and not only something to make 'em look prettier – but – well, a sort of sign or token of their self-respect.

Gerald: That's true.

Carl: Throughout the play, we can see just how much of Eva's fate is in the hands of men like Mr Birling, who fired her, Gerald who had an affair with her. There's Eric who is the father of her unborn child and who failed to take responsibility and look after her and the baby. Priestley uses these characters to symbolise men, and what they do to people they view as less than them.

Jean: Even though Eva fit into conventional ideas of beauty, she faced struggles at each point in her story because of the men who used their power to take advantage of her and the women who use their power and influence to sabotage her.

Carl: So in the play, the themes of class, social responsibility, and age all come together to shape the way Gerald and the Birlings see the world.

Jean: And they come together to shape the negative impact they all have on Eva's life. There are four different themes all intertwined, so be sure to think about how they cross over when you're reading the play and revising it.

Carl: Be sure to listen to the next episode of this podcast. We're going to talk about the form, the structure and the language of An Inspector Calls. We'll be getting into all the parts of play that you want to highlight and underline.

Jean: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Bitesize English literature podcast.

Carl: We have a lot more to discuss our listen to the other episodes on BBC Sounds to find out more.

BIRLING FAMILY: We are the Birling family.

GERALD: And Gerald. Gerald Croft. Crofts Limited. I’m Sheila’s fiancé.

SHEILA: Yes. And we’re here to play Finish the Line with Inspector Goole.

INSPECTOR: Hello. That is me. I have gathered the Birlings.

BIRLINGS: That’s us. That’s us.

INSPECTOR: Minus Eric, who predictably has gone missing.

BIRLINGS: We don’t talk about him.

INSPECTOR: To see if they can remember what they said earlier tonight. Are you ready?

SHEILA: Please. I was born wealthy. Uh, ready. I was born ready.

INSPECTOR: Finish this quote. ‘The world’s developing so fast that it’ll make…’

BIRLING: Money.

INSPECTOR: Wrong. The world is developing so fast that it’ll make war impossible. Congratulations, Mr Birling, that is correct.

SHEILA: Well done, you.

INSPECTOR: Well, you are wrong. Very wrong.

BIRLING: Fiddlesticks. It’s 1912. Nobody wants war. Do you want war?

GERALD: I don’t want war. I mean, there’s too much at stake these days. Quite.

SHEILA: Daddy’s very clever.

INSPECTOR: Yes, I am absolutely certain there’ll be no wars at all in the twentieth century.

BIRLING: Listen here, funny man. It is the age of progress. I mean, have you heard of the Titanic? They made a boat that is unsinkable.

SHEILA: Unsinkable. Daddy really is very clever.

BIRLING: I am. So give me my point, please.

INSPECTOR: Right. Well. This has been enormous fun. But I think it’s time we move on. No, no, we’re not finished. Do you think that was it?

BIRLING: Oh. No.

INSPECTOR: I’ve got loads of questions. Sit down. Thank you. Oh, well then. Time for round two.

This is a quote I said to all of you about the deceased.

ALL: Oh.

SHEILA: Why are we talking about the deceased?

INSPECTOR: Eva Smith.

SHEILA: Oh, that. What a rotten shame.

BIRLING: Why the devil do you want to go upsetting the child like that? You should be ashamed. She is a baby. An innocent baby.

GERALD: But also an adult. Just to be clear. Not marrying a baby.

INSPECTOR: Finish this quote. ‘Regarding Eva Smith’s death, each of you helped…’

BIRLING: Oh yes. I think we did. We are charitable people. We do our best to help others all the time, don’t we? Always trying our best.

INSPECTOR: Fantastic. Well done, Birlings. Well. This has been enormous fun.

SHEILA: Toodle-pip!

INSPECTOR: No. Sit down. Sit down. That’s not the quote. It’s, ‘Each of you helped…’

SHEILA: To kill her.

ALL: No! You—

BIRLING: Sheila, don’t talk nonsense.

INSPECTOR: Congratulations, Sheila. That is correct.

SHEILA: What?

INSPECTOR: Sheila, I’m going to take your paddle.

SHEILA: No!

BIRLING: Give it to Mummy. You can’t be trusted.

SHEILA: No. Give me my paddle!

BIRLING: Give it to me or there will be consequences—

SHEILA: I’m trying to tell the truth.

INSPECTOR: Give me the paddle.

ALL: Give her the paddle.

BIRLING: Give me the paddle. You know what? You ought to go to bed. I think you’ll feel better in the morning.

MRS BIRLING: Mm. She’s had a long, exciting and tiring day.

BIRLING: Exactly.

SHEILA: He means I’m getting hysterical.

INSPECTOR: And are you?

SHEILA: Probably.

INSPECTOR: Final question.

BIRLING: Ha!

INSPECTOR: I’m losing all patience with you people.

BIRLING: Inspector, perhaps you and I should go and talk this over quietly. In a corner.

INSPECTOR: It’s my duty to ask questions.

BIRLING: And it’s my duty to keep labour costs down. Sure, not directly relevant, but I’m just saying we’ve all got things going on.

INSPECTOR: Okay. Final round. Final question. Plenty still to play for. Plenty still to own up to.

Finish this quote. ‘We are members of one body. We are responsible for…’

GERALD: Crofts Limited.

BIRLING: Exactly. Keeping labour costs down. Didn’t I just say that?

SHEILA: Yeah. You did say that.

INSPECTOR: The quote was, ‘We are responsible for each other.’

‘And the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.’

SHEILA: I don’t remember that bit.

BIRLING: You’re such a drag.

INSPECTOR: But Sheila, you got the vague idea. You basically said the same thing twice. So I’ll give you the point.

SHEILA: Yay. It should feel good. But it doesn’t.

INSPECTOR: So the final scores are Sheila with two, Mr Birling with one. But the real loser is society. So, well played, everyone.

Oh. Titanic sinks, by the way.

BIRLINGS: That’s ridiculous!

SHEILA: Thank you. I have learnt something tonight.

BIRLING: Ha!

MRS BIRLING: Oh, darling. Well done. But, um, Sheila, the wedding’s still on, isn’t it?

GERALD: What do you mean it sinks?

MRS BIRLING: I’ve actually had enormous fun.

Ah. Yeah. Good to get out.