10/09/13 – 14/09/13 An Inspector Calls at Thame Players theatre

AN INSPECTOR CALLS by J.B. Priestley – The Players Theatre, Nelson Street, Thame, at 7.45pm from Tuesday, September 10m until Saturday, September 14.

Tickets £9 and £8 with £1 off for concessions available from Tickets Anywhere, Greyhound Walk, Thame, telephone 01844 217228 or online from www.thameplayers.co.uk

AN Inspector Calls is a play written by the celebrated English dramatist J. B. Priestley. First performed in 1945 in the Soviet Union, and in 1946 in the UK, it is one of Priestley’s best known works for the stage and considered to be one of the classics of mid-20th century English theatre. The play’s success and reputation has been boosted in recent years by a successful revival by English director, Stephen Daldry, for the National Theatre in 1992, and a tour of the UK in 2011-2012.

The play is a three-act drama, which takes place on a single night in 1912, focusing on the prosperous middle-class Birling family who live in a comfortable home in Brumley, “an industrial city in the north Midlands”. The family is visited by a man calling himself Inspector Goole, who questions the family about the suicide of a young working-class woman.

Long considered part of the repertory of classic ‘drawing room’ theatre, the play has also been hailed as a scathing critique of the hypocrisies of Victorian/Edwardian English society and as an expression of Priestley’s political principles. The play is studied in many schools in the UK as one of the prescribed texts for the English Literature GCSE examination.