50 Fun Facts About An Inspector Calls

Because no London theatre was free, in which country did An Inspector Calls have its 1945 premiere?

The Soviet Union staged it first, in productions by Moscow's Kamerny Theatre and Leningrad's Comedy Theatre, more than a year before the Old Vic company gave London its first look in October 1946.

Which brand-new liner does Arthur Birling hold up at dinner as proof of unstoppable progress?

The Titanic, 'unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable' in Birling's words, sank on 15 April 1912, so a 1946 London audience heard the boast as proof of how wrong the confident Edwardian was.

Which member of the dinner party does Inspector Goole question last?

Eric Birling is questioned last: he walks back in just after his mother has insisted that whoever got Eva pregnant must take the blame, unwittingly passing sentence on her own son.

Roughly how long did J. B. Priestley take to write An Inspector Calls?

About a week is the usual account, and Priestley himself put it at 'about ten days'; even so, no London theatre was free that season, so the play opened abroad first.

What had Eva Smith swallowed to kill herself, according to Inspector Goole?

Disinfectant is the detail the Inspector opens with, and Birling later mimics him mockingly ('She drank some strong disinfectant') once he has decided the whole story was invented.

What news, arriving by telephone, ends An Inspector Calls just as the Birlings begin to relax?

A policeman is on his way, the caller says, because a girl has just died on her way to the infirmary in a suspected suicide. The curtain falls before anyone can explain Goole.

Which actor, back from wartime service in the Navy, played Eric Birling in the play's 1946 London premiere?

Alec Guinness had spent the war in the Navy, commanding a landing craft at the invasion of Sicily, before he took the part of the drunken son at the New Theatre in October 1946.

Which actor played Inspector Goole, opposite Ken Stott's Arthur Birling, in the BBC's 2015 television film?

David Thewlis played Goole in Helen Edmundson's adaptation for BBC One, which, unlike the play, goes on following the Inspector after he walks out of the Birlings' house.

Priestley's 1940 BBC Postscripts drew 16 million listeners, second in popularity only to whom?

Winston Churchill alone outdrew him, and the Sunday talks were cancelled amid complaints that they were too left-wing.

In which fictional industrial city in the north Midlands do the Birlings hold their engagement dinner?

Brumley is Priestley's invention, described as 'an industrial city in the north Midlands', which lets the Birlings stand for any provincial manufacturing family.

Why did Arthur Birling sack Eva Smith from his works, the first link in the chain of events?

Leading a pay strike cost Eva her job: when the strike failed, Birling took the other women back at the old rates but sacked the 'four or five ringleaders', Eva among them.

Which department store dismissed Eva Smith after Sheila Birling complained while trying on a dress?

Milwards had suited Eva Smith: after her spell out of work she spent a happy couple of months there, until one customer's complaint got her dismissed without warning.

What does Sheila Birling admit was her real motive for having Eva Smith sacked from the shop?

Jealousy of her looks is the confession: Sheila had seen the dress look better on the assistant and caught her smiling. It is the first real remorse the Inspector draws out.

Which name did Eva Smith adopt after losing her shop job, a name that makes Gerald Croft start?

Daisy Renton is the alias Gerald recognises at once, and Sheila watches him give himself away before the Inspector has even asked a question.

Where does Gerald Croft admit he first met Eva Smith, cornered by a drunken alderman?

The Palace Bar is also where Eric later met her after a drinking spree, so the same seedy venue links both young men to her fall.

In what capacity did Sybil Birling refuse help to a pregnant, destitute Eva Smith?

Patron of a women's charity and chair of its committee, Sybil used her influence to have the appeal refused, offended that the pregnant girl had called herself 'Mrs Birling'.

Where did Eric Birling get the money he gave to the pregnant Eva Smith?

His father's office is where Eric took about fifty pounds, asking for cash when he collected accounts; Eva refused any more once she learned it was stolen.

Whom does Arthur Birling ring after the Inspector leaves, to check whether a Goole is on the force?

The chief constable, Colonel Roberts, is a friend of Birling's, and once he says there is no Inspector Goole on the force, Birling's verdict is instant: 'We've been had.'

What does Gerald Croft suggest the Inspector may have shown each family member separately?

A different photograph for each confession would mean several girls, not one, and Gerald's call to the infirmary seems to prove nobody died at all.

Besides a letter, what does Inspector Goole say he found in Eva Smith's room?

Her diary is how Goole claims to know so much: in it, he says, she wrote of going away to the seaside after Gerald 'just to make it last longer'.

Which maid announces Inspector Goole's arrival at the house?

Edna is the only working-class character the audience ever meets, since Eva Smith never appears, yet she comes and goes almost unnoticed by the family she waits on.

Which honour does Arthur Birling boast he expects in the next list, a hope scandal would wreck?

A knighthood is the prize Birling thinks is coming, which is why his first thought after the Inspector leaves is the scandal, not the dead girl.

Which actor played the Inspector in the 1954 British film, with Jane Wenham as Eva Smith?

Alastair Sim's Inspector is shown into the study to wait near the end of the film; when Birling goes back the room is empty, though its only door was in view the whole time.

In the 1954 film, the Inspector's surname was changed from Goole to what?

Poole replaced Goole on screen, costing the Inspector a surname that sounds like 'ghoul', the play's hint that its visitor may be something stranger than a detective.

Priestley's opening stage direction says the lighting should change to what once the Inspector arrives?

Brighter and harder replaces the 'pink and intimate' glow of the dinner, a cue that the Inspector's questioning will strip away the family's comfortable illusions.

Which 'sharp' sound cuts off Arthur Birling mid-speech as he praises every man looking after himself?

The doorbell's 'sharp ring' announces the Inspector at the exact moment Birling dismisses community, so the interruption is itself an argument.

Which word completes Goole's line 'We are members of one ___', spoken just before 'We are responsible for each other'?

Body is the word, and the image of society as one organism is the moral of the play, delivered before Goole walks out.

Goole warns that if men ignore the lesson they will be taught it 'in fire and blood and' what?

Anguish completes the line, which a 1946 audience heard as a prophecy of the two world wars that followed the play's 1912 setting.

Birling scoffs at the idea of community 'as if we were all mixed up together like' what?

Bees in a hive is the image Birling mocks seconds before the Inspector arrives to prove the opposite, that every life in the hive touches the rest.

Arthur Birling repeatedly describes himself with pride as what kind of 'business man'?

Hard-headed is his boast, and Priestley uses the hard-headed businessman as the vehicle for his attack on capitalism and the arrogance of the wealthy.

The Inspector says Eva Smith 'lies with a burnt-out inside' on what, in his most brutal description of her death?

A slab is where the Inspector places her, and the mortuary image is his answer whenever the family try to keep the dead girl abstract.

Sheila warns her family not to 'build up a kind of' what 'between us and that girl'?

Wall is Sheila's word, and she adds that the Inspector 'will just break it down', the first sign she grasps his method before anyone else.

Which future James Bond director made the 1954 film of An Inspector Calls?

Guy Hamilton, later the director of Goldfinger, wanted to film Dial M for Murder, but Alexander Korda sold that play to Hitchcock and handed him Priestley's instead.

Both the 1954 and 2015 screen versions differ from Priestley's one-room play by adding what?

Flashbacks let both films show Eva Smith herself, a character the stage play never lets the audience see. The 2015 version even follows the Inspector after he leaves.

Birling's confident 1912 claim that 'there isn't a chance of war' is a classic example of which device?

Dramatic irony works because the audience knows what Birling cannot: two world wars were coming, and the ship he praised would sink.

Which civic post does Arthur Birling boast of having held two years before the Inspector calls?

Lord Mayor, alderman and still a magistrate: Birling lists his titles to show he knows the local force well and has never seen this inspector, and his wife later repeats them to pull rank.

In which Yorkshire city, whose lost Victorian buildings he mourned, was J. B. Priestley born in 1894?

Bradford gave him his first job in the Swan Arcade, a building he later watched developers demolish, and a statue of him now stands outside its media museum.

Which left-wing party did Priestley help found in 1942, chairing it for only a few months?

Common Wealth grew out of the 1941 Committee, and Priestley stepped down as chairman because he could not stomach Sir Richard Acland's politics.

Which protest movement, launched in 1958, counted the 63-year-old Priestley among its founders?

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament grew out of the letters of support that greeted Priestley's November 1957 New Statesman article 'Britain and the Nuclear Bombs'; it launched three months later.

Having declined a life peerage and a Companion of Honour, which award did Priestley accept in 1977?

Order of Merit membership is the sovereign's personal gift, limited to 24 living members, and it was the one honour Priestley took, twelve years after refusing a seat in the Lords.

In Stephen Daldry's 1992 revival of An Inspector Calls, the Birlings' Edwardian house stands on what?

Stilts hold the Birlings' doll's-house home above a desolate post-Blitz street, Ian MacNeil's design for marooning the play's 1912 dinner party in the war-torn 1940s in which Priestley wrote it.

Priestley's 'time plays' drew on which aeronautical engineer's 1927 book An Experiment with Time?

J. W. Dunne, a pioneer aircraft designer who believed dreams could glimpse the future, gave Priestley the idea that past and present coexist.

Which 1929 novel about a touring concert party first made Priestley famous and won a James Tait Black prize?

The Good Companions is the new name a failing troupe, the Dinky Doos, takes when three strangers escaping dull lives, a bored schoolmaster among them, throw in their lot with it.

Which Priestley play jumps from a 1919 birthday party to 1937 and then back to 1919 seconds later?

Time and the Conways shows a prosperous Yorkshire family's ruin between the wars, then returns to the hopeful night of Kay's birthday party, when the seeds of it were being sown.

Which actor, knighted in 1947, played Inspector Goole in the play's first British production in 1946?

Ralph Richardson led the Old Vic company's 1946 cast at the New Theatre and was knighted in the 1947 New Year Honours, to the undisguised envy of Laurence Olivier, who had to wait six more months.

Daldry's production won the inaugural Best Revival of a Play prize at which American awards in 1994?

Tony Awards for revivals had lumped plays and musicals together until that year, when plays got a category of their own; voters also named Daldry best director, and the Broadway run lasted 454 performances.

Which It's a Wonderful Life actor played Inspector Goole when the play opened on Broadway in 1947?

Thomas Mitchell, the film's forgetful Uncle Billy, opened at the Booth Theatre on 21 October 1947 for just 95 performances, a short run beside the 454 that Daldry's revival managed on Broadway in 1994.

Who played Goole in Daldry's 1992 revival, earning an Olivier nomination he would not convert until 2016?

Kenneth Cranham waited 23 years for the Olivier itself, finally winning for Florian Zeller's The Father. Horror fans know him as Hellraiser II's Dr Channard.

Daldry's revival of An Inspector Calls opened in September 1992 at which London theatre?

Lyttelton audiences saw it first; the production then toured Britain, moved to the Aldwych in the West End and collected four Olivier awards, including Best Revival and Best Director.

Which actress played Eva Smith, a character the stage play never shows, in the BBC's 2015 An Inspector Calls?

Sophie Rundle gave the unseen girl a face in added scenes of Eva's life and death that Priestley only has others describe, and nearly six million people watched on the night.