The second reason is that it is a gripping piece of drama that maintains the shape and atmosphere of a thriller. It is a play that demands answers to questions that can only be found by continued watching. As soon as the Inspector walks into that drawing room we are hooked. Who is this girl Eva Smith? Why did she kill herself? Did each member of this family really have a hand in her demise? What did they do? Why did they do it? Who is this Inspector? Is he a real Inspector or someone or something else? And then of course at the very end the telephone rings bringing more questions and questions about questions. Again, time makes its entrance here in the form of history, on which Professor Linden has his own refreshingly different views. One evening in the spring of 1912, the Birlings are celebrating their daughter Sheila’s engagement to Gerald Croft, who is also present. Husband and wife Arthur and Sybil Birling, along with their son Eric, are pleased with themselves. Birling toasts the happy couple, and Gerald presents Sheila with a ring which absolutely delights her. Gerald and the elder Birlings celebrate in relief, but Eric and Sheila continue to rue their and the family's actions. Birling is then rung by the police, who explain that a young woman has just died at the infirmary in a suspected suicide, and that the police are on their way to question the family. The Inspector's identity is left unexplained, but it is clear that the family's confessions over the course of the evening have all been true, and that public disgrace will soon befall them.

As we reach the 70th Anniversary since its first staging in Russia in 1945, we ask what is the enduring appeal of An Inspector Calls? What makes it Priestley’s most performed and most popular play? Pinpointing one single reason is difficult so let us consider three. There are four plays in this book and the first three of them are superb. The fourth is good but to be honest I also found it a bit boring. Why? For the simple reason that the first three have metaphysical, supernatural, moral, social and paradoxical elements. The fourth only has the moral and social input. But let's not be too harsh on 'The Linden Tree'. Certainly the characters in the play are very engaging and the ending is excellent, namely the hint of the resurgence of the spirit of a great professor who has almost, but not quite, been crushed by circumstances outside his control. Birling makes a lengthy speech, not only congratulating Gerald and Sheila, but also commenting on the state of the nation. He predicts prosperity, particularly referring to the example of the “unsinkable” Titanic, which set sail the week earlier. Birling styles himself as a “hard-headed man of business.” The play was produced and performed at the Ferdowsi Theatre in Iran in late 1940s based on the translation by Bozorg Alavi. It was staged in the first season of the Edinburgh Gateway Company in 1953. [14] Priestley, J.B. (1950). Introduction to the Plays of J.B.Priestly. Vol.III. London: Heinemann. pp.xii–xiii.The following text, by Dr John Baxendale, is a programme essay for a production Of An Inspector Calls at the Canadian Shaw Festival, 2008. After the new wave of social realist theatre in the 1950s and 1960s, the play fell out of fashion and was dismissed as an example of outdated bourgeois "drawing room" dramas, but it became a staple of regional repertory theatre. Following several successful revivals (including Stephen Daldry's 1992 production for the National Theatre), the play was "rediscovered" and hailed as a damning social criticism of capitalism and middle-class hypocrisy in the manner of the social realist dramas of Shaw and Ibsen. It has been read as a parable about the destruction of Victorian social values and the disintegration of pre-World War I English society, and Goole's final speech has been interpreted variously as a quasi-Christian vision of hell and judgement and as a socialist manifesto.

Doctor Gortler, a displaced German scientist, arrives at the Double Bull Inn run by Sam Shipley and his widowed daughter Sally Pratt in Grindle Moor, North Yorkshire. Apparently, he seems to know that the industrialist Ormund and his wife Janet are due to arrive there - and also about the drama to be played out between them and Oliver Farrant, a schoolmaster teaching at one of the Ormund schools. As the events play out in their inevitability, Dr. Gottler acts as a sort of deus ex machina to resolve them. A policeman interrupts a rich family's dinner to question them about the suicide of a young working-class girl. As their guilty secrets are gradually revealed over the course of the evening, 'An Inspector Calls', J. B. Priestley's most famous play, shows us the terrible consequences of poverty and inequality. The other powerful plays in this collection - 'Time and the Conways', 'I Have Been Here Before' and 'The Linden Tree' - explore time, fate, free will and the effects of war.

Edinburgh Gateway Company (1965), The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company, 1953 - 1965, St. Giles Press, Edinburgh, p. 44 Remember Eva Smith: The Inspector's Russian Journey". 100 Objects from Special Collections at the University of Bradford. Yorkshire, England: University of Bradford. 15 June 2011. Archived from the original on 7 October 2015 . Retrieved 4 October 2015. History, to be worthy of the name, should bring us a stereoscopic view of man's life. Without that extra dimension, strangely poignant as well as vivid, it is flat and because it is flat, it is false. There are two patterns, endlessly being superimposed on one another. The first pattern is that of man reproducing himself, finding food and shelter, tilling the land, building cities, crossing the seas. It is the picture we understand now with ease, perhaps too easily. For the other pattern is still there, waiting to be interpreted. It is the record of man as a spiritual creature, with a whole world of unknown continents and strange seas, gardens of Paradise and cities lit with hell-fire, within the depths of his own soul. History that ignores the god and the altar is as false as history that could forget the sword and the wheel...'