Performance skills: Video playlist

An explanation of Inspector Goole’s character in JB Priestley’s play ‘An Inspector Calls’. The clip looks at how the Inspector shows humanity towards the Birlings and understands the journey they need to go on. It raises the idea that the play is like a puzzle in which the audience need to work out what the Inspector does not know.

This clip could be used as the starting point for an exploration of how two pivotal moments in the play - the speech by the Inspector and the telephone call - are both such crucial moments in the play. Students can examine the effect of removing the Inspector’s key speech at the end of the play, and then how to use the moment between his exit and the telephone call announcing the arrival of the ‘real’ Inspector. Students could be asked to consider how to present the ‘other-worldliness’ of the Inspector. How might they use staging, costume, exits and entrances, and the reactions of other characters, in order to present him as either a figure from the ‘real world’ or as a more ethereal character? To what extent would a production be affected by making the Inspector either more rooted in the real world, or more ethereal as a character?