An Inspector Calls

About An Inspector Calls

An Inspector Calls (1945) by J.B. Priestley is the most performed British play after Shakespeare — the Birling family's dinner celebration disrupted by Inspector Goole, who investigates the death of a girl named Eva Smith and reveals each family member's complicity in her destruction. Written in 1945 and set in 1912, the play uses dramatic irony to organize its socialist moral: the Birlings' confident assumptions about their world are known to the audience to be catastrophically wrong.