A Drawing Room Designed to Explode: Rereading An Inspector Calls

There’s a reason An Inspector Calls remains firmly entranced in the GCSE syllabus: it’s deceptively simple. A family gathered in an Edwardian drawing room. A knock at the door. A mysterious outsider who knows far more than he should. Structurally, it’s a classic whodunnit or cosy drawing room drama - except, as Stephen Daldry’s now-iconic production made clear, this is a drawing room designed to explode.

I only got the play after seeing that production. Until then, it felt like a dry, obvious piece of didactic theatre. But Daldry’s 1992 staging (with the Birling home cracking open and collapsing into a rain-drenched street) revealed what Priestley was really doing: using the polished forms of old-school theatre to smuggle in something far more subversive.  A neat box of privilege shattered by uncomfortable truths.  A period drama that becomes a political reckoning.

But here’s the rub: the more we teach it, the more we risk sanding off its edges. 

Students often reduce it to a tidy moral equation: the Birlings = bad, the Inspector = good, Eva = victim, and the twist ending = warning.  Tick.  Tick.  Yawn.  Done.

Except it’s not that neat.

Priestley ends the play on a deliberately unsettling note . Yes, the Inspector reveals painful truths - but was he even real?  Did Eva actually die?  And if she didn’t, does that let the family off the hook?  Does her silence mean we shouldn't listen?

The final phone call - Chekhov’s gun finally fired - reminds us: if you don’t learn the lesson the first time, history repeats itself.  And it’s always worse the second time around.

With two weeks to go until this year’s exam papers land, it’s worth thinking about the two moral questions: who takes responsibility for those without power and what happens when privilege shields people from consequence?