It's a timely theatrical message

By Tissa Jayatilaka

E.M.D. Upali's adaptation of J.B. Priestley's much acclaimed play An Inspector Calls (Ewa Balawa) will be staged at the Lumbini Theatre on August 14, 15 and 16. Incidentally August 14, 1998 happens to be the 14th death anniversary of Priestley, one of the more versatile of the English creative writers of the 20th century.

Born to parents (his father was English and the mother Irish) who had a working class ancestry, Priestley (1894-1989) was a novelist of note, essayist, dramatist and a shrewd observer of the Western literary scene as demonstrated by his noteworthy Literature and Western Man (1960)

Many, however, believe the best of Priestley is in his plays, which he began writing in 1932. Ivor Brown, a perceptive critic, thought so and so did Frank Swinnerton in The Geordian Literary Scene (1938). His plays are extremely good as "closet drama". Making them come alive as drama in performance is a formidable challenge. Priestley himself has remarked on this aspect of his dramatic writing in the introduction to volume II of The Plays when he observed that with a comedy "inflections and timing are important."

An Inspector Calls (1946) is an example of what is known as a well-made play popularised by Scribe and Sardou in France during the second half of the nineteenth century. The play progresses from ignorance to knowledge not only for the audience but for the characters as well. The playwright has observed the classical unities of time, place and action in his structure with the time span of the play in performance corresponding with the actual time the events presented would take to unfold in real life.

As in Priestley's earliest play Dangerous Corner (written in 1932 and dismissed later by the playwright himself as an ingenious box of tricks), An Inspector Calls resorts to ripping off of masks we human beings not infrequently wear, with the addition of "a maguslike" police inspector relentlessly pursuing the truth. The deft manipulation of the plot also adds to the general excitement. Just when the audience is tiring of discoveries, the whole action is given a violent twist and everyone is caught up in the unfolding events.

The theme of An Inspector Calls is something Priestley has dwelt on in several of his essays. In Thoughts in the Wilderness (1957), Priestley has observed that -

a man is a member of a community and the fact that he is a member of a community immensely enlarges his stature and increases his opportunities.... But as well as being a member of a community a man is also a person, a unique individual, and it is in fact the business of the community not simply to glorify itself but to produce better persons, to enrich its individual sphere.

Priestley's philosophic views are as relevant today as they were more than half a century ago when he expressed them through his novels, essays and plays. Man's craving for fleeting material pleasures has, as it were, come full circle in today's new scheme of things where economic competitiveness seems to have become the touchstone of existence. We are faced with the possible new danger of corporate hegemony replacing the politico-military hegemony of the past. The sooner we realise, as Priestley unfailingly reminds us in his writings, the greater importance of interdependence as opposed to independence, and of community as opposed to unbridled individuality, the closer we shall be to a less meaningless existence.

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