Preparation for the task! (Taken from BBC Website)

(Having a bit of trouble figuring out how to upload as a google doc - so I will put a bit of prep on there for you to be getting on with)

TASK - Explore the ways in which the theme of RESPONSIBILITY is presented to the audience in the play.

To begin with, it is absolutely essential that you understand the background to this play. The best way for you to get your heads around this will be for me to take some snippets from BBC’s Bitesize site, which sums up the issues surrounding this play nicely.

It is essential that your introduction outlines these issues:

*What was the world like when the play was written?

*What was it like when the play was set?

*What are the playwright’s main messages and lessons to the watching audience?

Etc.

John Boynton Priestley was born in Yorkshire in 1894. He knew early on that he wanted to become a writer, but decided against going to university as he thought he would get a better feel for the world around him away from academia. Instead, he became a junior clerk with a local wool firm at the age of 16.

When the First World War broke out, Priestley joined the infantry and only just escaped death on a number of occasions. After the war, he gained a degree from Cambridge University, then moved to London to work as a freelance writer. He wrote successful articles and essays, then published the first of many novels, The Good Companions, in 1929. He wrote his first play in 1932 and went on to write 50 more. Much of his writing was ground-breaking and controversial. He included new ideas about possible parallel universes and strong political messages.

During the Second World War he broadcast a massively popular weekly radio programme which was attacked by the Conservatives as being too left-wing. The programme was eventually cancelled by the BBC for being too critical of the Government.

He continued to write into the 1970s, and died in 1984.

During the 1930's Priestley became very concerned about the consequences of social inequality in Britain, and in 1942 Priestley and others set up a new political party, the Common Wealth Party, which argued for public ownership of land, greater democracy, and a new 'morality' in politics. The party merged with the Labour Party in 1945, but Priestley was influential in developing the idea of the Welfare State which began to be put into place at the end of the war.

He believed that further world wars could only be avoided through cooperation and mutual respect between countries, and so became active in the early movement for a United Nations. And as the nuclear arms race between West and East began in the 1950s, he helped to found CND, hoping that Britain would set an example to the world by a moral act of nuclear disarmament.

This was the period of the Russian Revolution, two appalling world wars, the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb.

This table describes what society was like in 1912 and in 1945

An Inspector Callsis set in 1912	An Inspector Calls was written in 1945.	Images
The First World War would start in two years. Birling's optimistic view that there would not be a war is completely wrong.	The Second World War ended in Europe on 8 May 1945. People were recovering from nearly six years of warfare, danger and uncertainty.
There were strong distinctions between the upper and lower classes.	Class distinctions had been greatly reduced as a result of two world wars.
Women were subservient to men. All a well off women could do was get married; a poor woman was seen as cheap labour.	As a result of the wars, women had earned a more valued place in society.
The ruling classes saw no need to change the status quo.	There was a great desire for social change. Immediately after The Second World War, Clement Attlee's Labour Party won a landslide victory over Winston Churchill and the Conservatives.

Priestley deliberately set his play in 1912 because the date represented an era when all was very different from the time he was writing. In 1912, rigid class and gender boundaries seemed to ensure that nothing would change. Yet by 1945, most of those class and gender divisions had been breached. Priestley wanted to make the most of these changes. Through this play, he encourages people to seize the opportunity the end of the war had given them to build a better, more caring society.

Bitesize also offers some points/notes about responsibility which will be worth reading to help with your planning etc:

In An Inspector Calls, the central theme is responsibility. Priestley is interested in our personal responsibility for our own actions and our collective responsibility to society. The play explores the effect of class, age and sex on people's attitudes to responsibility, and shows how prejudice can prevent people from acting responsibly.

So, how does Priestley weave the themes through the play?

Responsibility

Enlarge image

The words responsible and responsibilityare used by most characters in the play at some point.

Each member of the family has a different attitude to responsibility. Make sure that you know how each of them felt about their responsibility in the case of Eva Smith.

The Inspector wanted each member of the family to share the responsibility of Eva's death: he tells them, "each of you helped to kill her." However, his final speech is aimed not only at the characters on stage, but at the audience too:

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.

The Inspector is talking about a collective responsibility, everyone is society is linked, in the same way that the characters are linked to Eva Smith. Everyone is a part of "one body", the Inspector sees society as more important than individual interests. The views he is propounding are like those of Priestley who was a socialist.

He adds a clear warning about what could happen if, like some members of the family, we ignore our responsibility:

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

What would Priestley have wanted his audience to think of when the Inspector warns the Birlings of the "fire and blood and anguish"?

Probably he is thinking partly about the world war they had just lived through - the result of governments blindly pursuing 'national interest' at all costs. No doubt he was thinking too about the Russian revolution in which poor workers and peasants took over the state and exacted a bloody revenge against the aristocrats who had treated them so badly.