About the Play:

An Inspector Calls was named by the Royal National Theatre of Britain as one of the best 100 plays of the 20th century.

An Inspector Calls is a full-length drama by J.B. Priestley. In this thriller, a police inspector visits an engagement party in a middle-class home in the English countryside to question the guests about the recent death of a young woman. His investigation into the death by suicide shatters the evening and his startling revelations shake the very foundations of their lives.

An Inspector Calls is a classic British thriller about a mysterious police inspector who appears out of the fog to upend the lives of a prosperous and self-satisfied family implicated in the death of a young woman. The action of the play occurs in an English industrial city, where a young girl dies by suicide and an eminently respectable British family is subject to a routine inquiry in connection with the death. An inspector interrupts a celebratory dinner to interrogate the family, and during the course of his questioning, all members of the group are implicated lightly or deeply in the girl's undoing. The family, closely knit and friendly at the beginning of the evening, is shown up as selfish, self-centered or cowardly, its good humour turning to acid, and good fellowship to dislike, before the evening is over. The surprising revelation, however, is in the inspector – who turns out to be no copper at all but a mysterious individual with full knowledge of everyone's connection with the suicide. After the false inspector has been shown up, and it is discovered that no suicide had been recorded, an actual copper shows, and a last-minute suicide is reported, which ties in mysteriously with the foregoing. Considered to be one of the classics of mid-20th century English theatre, An Inspector Calls was written when society was undergoing sweeping transformations. While holding its audience with the gripping tension of a detective thriller, it is also a philosophical play about social conscience and the crumbling of middle class values.

An Inspector Calls had its first British production in 1946 at the New Theatre and ran for 8 years in London's West End. The classic thriller has enjoyed enormously successful revivals at the National Theatre in London and on Broadway, and is regularly performed in regional repertory, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 4 male

What people say:

"J.B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century. And it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius." — Dame Judi Dench

"To those who love a good mystery, those who want a story to let them do a little thinking of their own, ​or those who quite simply are interested in a show with a wonderful ensemble, An Inspector Calls is most certainly for you." — Monadnock Ledger

John Boynton Priestley, OM (1894-1984), known as J. B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 26 novels and numerous dramas, including the classic thriller An Inspector Calls.