An Inspector Calls and Oldfashioned Propaganda at the Shaw Festival

On the face of it, how could two plays be more different than An Inspector Calls and THE TINY Foxes? (Both come in repertory at the Shaw Festival throughout its 2008 season; I review the former in this post and the latter in this article) In one play, a police detective explores the life span and untimely death of a woman within an English industrial town; the other handles greed and infighting within an Alabama family.

Yet these plays - a British mystery classic and a classic American drama - were cut from the same cloth. They will have parallel plots, parallel themes, even parallel characters.

Two capitalist families

In THE TINY Foxes, Lillian Hellman gives us the Hubbards, a family group of Alabama cotton merchants which has money, but no social position.

In An Inspector Calls, written only six years later, J. B. Priestley gives us the Hubbards' English counterparts, the Birlings, a family group of manufacturers within an English industrial town. The Birlings have money, but no social position.

Two unholy business alliances

Each play begins with a dinner party. In THE TINY Foxes, the Hubbards are toasting a proposed business alliance with an industrialist from Chicago. The new partners count on avoiding the labor agitation that plagues northern industry by building a cotton mill in the Hubbards' southern town.

In An Inspector Calls, the Birlings are also celebrating a small business alliance, the engagement of these daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, the son of these principal business competitor. Arthur Birling and Croft expect the marriage alliance to result in business understandings that may yield higher prices and suppression of labor agitation.

Two lead characters motivated by social ambition

In THE TINY Foxes, Regina Hubbard intends to leverage her home based business relationship into a prominent social position in Chicago society.

Similarly, An Inspector Calls finds Arthur Birling angling for a knighthood. With a title and his new connection with the socially superior Crofts, he hopes to vault in to the upper echelons of English society.

Two sons

Each family includes a dissolute son in his early twenties. Leo Hubbard works in his uncle Horace's bank and embezzles. Eric Birling works in his father's office, drinks, and embezzles. Both young men patronize prostitutes.

Two daughters

Each family includes a daughter in her late teens. The Hubbards intend to marry Alexandra off to her wastrel cousin Leo to keep all the profit the family. Alexandra is the only relation with a moral or social conscience (her aunt Birdie has strong humane instincts, but she is a victim of the Hubbards, not properly a member of family).

The Birlings intend to marry Sheila Birling off to the son of a competitor to consolidate their financial and social standing. Sheila may be the only 1 of the Birlings with a lot of a conscience; she sees that her father's factory employees "aren't cheap labour - they're people."

Two indictments

Each of these two plays indicts a capitalist family on multiple counts of crimes both personal and social.

By the finish of THE TINY Foxes, we realize that the Hubbards strike their women, teach their sons to steal, search for sport while the poor go hungry, beat their horses, keep mistresses, blackmail one another, cheat black folk, charge usury, corrupt public officials, and beat down attempts by employees to arrange. (I complain about Lillian Hellman's use of the Hubbards as whipping boys for American capitalism in my earlier post.)

Initially, the Birlings seem far less dreadful. We learn, however (as do the characters themselves), that they are guilty of exactly the same types of crimes. Arthur Birling has discharged and blackballed a factory employee for getting the temerity to ask for two shillings more per week (think Oliver Twist) and attempting to organize a strike. Sheila Birling gets exactly the same unfortunate girl discharged from a job as a shopgirl for considering her the wrong way. Crofts, the near future son-in-law, finds the girl unemployed and hungry, makes her his mistress, then abandons her. Then your Birlings' wastrel son meets her, now a prostitute, uses her, and gets her pregnant. By the end of her rope, the girl seeks charity from the private aid society controlled by Mrs. Birling, who turns her away.

Two soap boxes

Each playwright divides the world neatly into those who take and those who are taken from. In The Little Foxes:

Addie: "Well, you can find people who eat the earth and eat all of the people onto it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are individuals who stand around watching them eat it.

In An Inspector Calls:

Birling: "If you don't come down sharply on some of these people, they'd soon be requesting the earth."

The Inspector: "They might. But in the end it's better to ask for the earth than to take it."

Putting out somebody's talking points

Within an excellent essay in the program for the Shaw Festival's production of An Inspector Calls, Professor John Baxendale softpedals the play's political implications. Far from implicitly condoning violent Soviet-style revolution, he says, Priestley had not been even promoting his political party's radical legislative agenda. The essay maintains that Priestley sought merely to foster feelings of mutual responsibility among his countrymen.

"The play isn't about social reform [says Professor Baxendale], better health care or full employment, important though these things are, but about a vision of how life could be different if we acknowledge the fact we all have been members of one another."

Indeed, initially blush that is apparently what the Inspector says (and he speaks with Priestley's voice) in his grand, melodramatic speech:

"One Eva Smith went - but you can find untold thousands and an incredible number of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their hopes and fears, their suffering, and chance of happiness, all intertwined with this lives, with what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other."

But warm fuzzy communal feelings and private charity weren't what either J. B. Priestley or Lillian Hellman were about. Nor was the social gospel of "love thy neighbor"; nothing could have been further from Priestley's mind compared to the Christian communalism of the next chapter of Acts.

His message, instead, was that when Britain and America refused to simply accept socialism, bloody times were ahead, and mercy could not be expected. Therefore Priestley ended the Inspector's grand lecture with exactly this type of grim warning:

"We are in charge of each other. And I tell you that enough time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish."

Professor Baxendale asserts that the Inspector's "fire and blood" language refers to the two world wars, instead of to revolutionary violence, but this is not a good reading. Priestley made no attempt in this play to disguise his admiration for Soviet socialism. In explaining the methods of the Inspector to her family, Priestley has Sheila Birling allude to Vladimir Lenin's famous boast about capitalist rope when she says, "No, he's giving us rope - so that we'll hang ourselves."

One can almost believe that both of these extraordinarily talented dramatists, Hellman and Priestley, were working from the list of Marxist "talking points" for their plays:

* Portray all capitalists as instinctive monopolists and enemies of organized labor

* Caricature capitalists as holding extreme, selfish, individualist points of view

* Portray them as willing to pimp their own daughters for gain

* Portray their sons as thieves so when sexually ravenous

* Portray private charitable institutions (like Mrs. Birling's) as corrupt and degrading

* Portray private ownership of land as unjust

* Show the planet as divided into "us" (the worker class) versus "them" (the capitalist class)

Little wonder that An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes ended up being practically exactly the same play!

Priestley bought in to the party line that capitalists are on the incorrect side of history and that Soviet-style socialism represented the best hope for mankind. Early within an Inspector Calls, occur 1912, Arthur Birling complacently tells his family how nicely the world is shaping up. There's no war coming, he says, just "several scaremongers here creating a fuss about nothing." Consider the new aeroplanes, consider the automobiles, "bigger and faster all the time," look at the huge new ocean liner set to sail the next week, the Titanic. In thirty years, Birling assures his family, labor troubles is a thing of the past, and the world will have forgotten "each one of these silly little war scares."

Writing in 1945, Priestley expected his audience to smile sadly at Birling's foolish prophecies. How short-sighted Birling and the capitalists were, we have been to think. And not just that: Birling was predicting "peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere - except needless to say in Russia, which will always be behindhand, naturally." Wrong about the Titanic, wrong about Russia!

But Priestley was worse when compared to a poor prophet; he didn't see that which was before his eyes. Like so a great many other fellow travelers, Priestley believed that the fantastic socialist experiment in the U.S.S.R. had already succeeded; in fact, the blood of millions in eastern Europe had been shed and then sustain a brutal Soviet regime where the old bosses had merely been replaced by new bosses.

In his preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession (also the main Shaw Festival's 2008 season, however, not scheduled to open till early July), Shaw was forthright in what he intended to accomplish in his plays: "I am convinced that artwork is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most efficient method of moral propagandism on earth . . . ." WITHIN AN Inspector Calls, J. B. Priestley proved himself Shaw's staunch disciple.