The Inspector’s Call: J.B. Priestley’s plea for justice resonates far beyond his most famous play stage

HOh on earth can you sum up JB Priestley? He wrote 39 plays, 26 novels and a wealth of non-fiction, and Virginia Woolf, with her characteristic snobbery, dismissed him as “a merchant of literature.” But, in art as in life, dealers are invaluable, and with one of Priestley’s most popular plays, When We Marry, about to be revived at the Donmar Warehouse in London, it is worth asking what qualities make him such a durable playwright.

It makes sense to start with An Inspector Calls, which Stephen Daldry famously revived in 1992 in a production that has been running for more than 30 years. What Daldry and his designer, Ian MacNeill, did was cut the broad outlines of the play and treat it as an expressive tale about a family on the verge of self-destruction.

But I am convinced that the reason the play survives lies in the importance of the Inspector’s final warning: “We do not live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.” Whether in 1946 under a hard-pressed Labor government, in the post-Thatcher world of 1992, or in today’s brutally polarized society, this message has timeless resonance.

When I reread many of Priestley’s plays, I am struck by the endless repetition of the demand for social justice, allied with romantic mysticism. 1937 saw the simultaneous production of two of Priestley’s plays about time: “Time and the Conways”, based on J. W. Dunne’s ideas about the coexistence of past, present and future, and “I’ve Been Here Before”, about Ouspensky’s idea of ​​life recurring in an endless spiral. But although the idea of ​​time is fascinating, both plays are grounded in Priestley’s humanistic socialism.

The most poignant moment in the first play is Mama’s ideal dream of “a free, happy, and prosperous people, all with equal opportunities, and at peace with the whole world.” The words were uttered in 1919 and take on a poignant irony when the action moves to 1937. There is an equally heart-stopping moment in the second play when an industrialist confronts working-class hostility to a German refugee by saying: “All over this rotten world now, they’re shutting doors in good men’s faces. But we’ve still got one or two doors open here.” I can imagine I would get a warm response if heard on a British stage today.

My favorite of Priestley’s plays is The Linden Tree. Written during the frigid, crisis-ridden month of January 1947 when the country was at a standstill, it was memorably brought to life by Christopher Morahan at the Orange Tree in 2006, a forerunner of the state-of-the-nation plays we now associate with David Hare and James Graham. In essence, Priestley hits two targets. Since the play is about the forced retirement of an idealistic history professor at the age of 65, it highlights society’s disregard for age and experience. But the essence of the play lies in the professor’s confrontation with his daughter, who fled England to live a life of expatriate grandeur in France.

While acknowledging the monotonous austerity of modern Britain, Linden asks his daughter to realize that the country is trying to do something as extraordinary as it is difficult: “to have a one-time revolution without terrorism, without mob looting and secret police, sudden arrests, mass suicides and executions, without swinging a massive pendulum of violence that could decimate three generations before it reaches a dead end.” It is difficult to have a more pointed attack on tyranny or a more forceful defense of Attlee’s post-war government.

In the same year as The Linden Tree, Priestley published a passionately polemical book, The View of the Theater, which applied socialist principles to reactionary industry. He attacks fat theater owners, petty politicians, bigoted game-goers, and even celebrities. But he argues strongly for increased support, touring by national companies and a series of civic theaters that reflect local character and outlook.

Some of what Priestley wished for had come true: his vision of a thriving network of regional reference companies with their own distinct identity that had been eroded by time and lack of funding. But Priestley was always an idealist with a touch of mysticism. You see that in a play like A Midsummer Day’s Dream, written in 1949 and set on the Sussex Downs in 1975.

Set in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, the film shows an American industrialist, a Russian bureaucrat and an Indian chemical researcher who are enriched by their encounters with Shakespearean and Kiplingesque magic in rural England. When I saw the play revived at the Finborough in 2013, it struck me as largely fictional but clear evidence that within Priestley, the visionary socialist, there was always a mystical romanticism struggling to emerge.