How to Analyse the Audience in An Inspector Calls

Analysing the audience is such an important part to analysing 'An Inspector Calls'. Why? Because unlike with poetry or fiction, it is a medium designed to be performed in the moment to its audience. There's therefore a much closer connection and relationship between audience and play. It's particularly true for 'An Inspector Calls' because the play is also so much about real life Britain and trying to give a strong moral message to the British audience watching.

Despite this, many students do not talk about the audience at all. Or, if they do, it is in very generic terms like 'this makes the audience feel shocked'.

Having an insightful understanding of the audience's reaction to the events in 'An Inspector Calls' is a fantastic way to push your essays to the higher levels and reach those top grades. So, in this video, I talk you through how to do just that. In this video, we go beyond basic emotion buzzwords to explore how you can treat the audience as an active, shifting participant in the drama.

⏱️Timestamp⏱️ 

0:00 Explore the audience's journey

5:58 The audience and the detective genre

7:58 The audience and dramatic irony

This video is on my YouTube channel. However, there are a few benefits to watching it here instead:

1. You can register to keep a track of which videos you’ve watched
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There are also resources to help you in the Study Materials section:

An Inspector Calls Vocabulary Bank

The words in this vocabulary bank will help you to develop a more sophisticated and high level understanding of the key ideas and concepts in 'An Inspector Calls'.

As well as providing a range of words, their definitions and an example sentence, this book also suggests a number of activities that you can use to revise and put the vocabulary into practice.

Bonus - it's completely free!

An Inspector Calls AQA GCSE Model Answers (Coming soon!)

This resource will have model answers for multiple years of AQA past papers, giving you the ability to see what high grade essays look like for a range of essay questions.

An Inspector Calls Edexcel IGCSE Model Answers (Coming soon!)

This resource will have model answers for multiple years of Edexcel past papers, giving you the ability to see what high grade essays look like for a range of essay questions.

An Inspector Calls Flipped Learning (Coming soon!)

This resource is designed for teachers and students: it is a workbook designed to be completed alongside all of my An Inspector Calls videos. It is essentially a structured way for you to take notes and ensure that you are squeezing every ounce of advice my videos have to offer.

I fully intend to add more videos and study materials on this play. If there's something in particular you're looking for, then register and get in touch to let me know what would help you.

Lesson Transcript:

If your essays use sentences like "this makes the audience feel shocked" or "the audience hate Mr. Birling," I want you to watch this video, because it is super important to explore the context of reception, which is how the audience reacts to the play. And I'm really glad that you're doing that in your essays, but those kinds of sentences are not going to get you the highest possible marks.

Why? Because the audience isn't a single group of people sitting in the dark gasping on cue. To get those top marks, you need to show a much more nuanced understanding of the audience as a shifting participant in the drama. And today, we're going to cover some of the high-level ways to write about the audience in An Inspector Calls that will really upgrade your analysis.

The first key point is that audiences don't show up to a play and instantly have a really strong reaction. When that curtain goes up, they know absolutely nothing. And over the course of the play, they gain information that influences how they feel. You want to combine structural analysis with analysis of the context of reception to explore the audience's journey over the course of the play.

Think about Act 1. The Inspector hasn't shown up yet, and we know nothing about Eva Smith at this point. Mr. Birling is waxing on about his profits and business in his nice dining room in evening wear. And the audience is watching all of this, and, you know, maybe there's an element of judgment that he seems a little arrogant, or maybe they're not really thinking anything about it at all. You know, it's just sort of: rich people going to rich. You know, "if you're homeless, just buy a house."

And then he insists that there won't be war in front of an audience who are not even a year out of World War II, and many of whom would have also lived through World War I. Now, that is going to create a visceral reaction.

Let's think about the structural significance of that. Priestley doesn't immediately have Mr. Birling say horrible things; he behaves exactly as someone who is a member of his class would. The audience may therefore watch it unquestioningly. But then Priestley has him say something that he knows the audience will have a strong negative reaction to. All of a sudden, the audience are joining together their anger or irritation or dislike of his arrogance with the source of that arrogance: his wealth, and his belief that businessmen don't guess, they know. Where once they may not have questioned the class system—they just accepted it at the face value of what it is—now they're starting to negatively judge it.

And of course, that judgment enhances many times over as we learn about Eva Smith and everything the Birlings did, and then again when they refuse to take responsibility. You can imagine the audience's journey almost like a graph that changes over time. You need to show you understand that their emotions didn't start up here. They didn't walk in hating the Birlings, nor do they stay the same way the whole way through the play.

I actually think Sheila and Eric are two of the best characters for exploring the nuance of audience reaction. There's no denying that Priestley wants us to very critically judge Mr. and Mrs. Birling, but the whole point of Sheila and Eric is the fact that they have a redemption. And so from the off, the Inspector makes them have more likable elements alongside the elitist arrogance that they've learned from their parents. Eric, for instance, tries to argue back against his father when Mr. Birling is insisting there won't be a war, and the audience is going to notice that. They aren't necessarily going to love Eric for it or hate him for it; they will notice it.

And that's an important point: I don't want you to feel like you have to commit yourself to these really strong emotion words—"this will make the audience feel angry," "this will make the audience feel sad," and so on. Instead, explain what they're going to notice, and try to match that with a thinking verb: "The audience will notice the contrast between Eric and his father, and perhaps reflect on, question, wonder, judge," etc.

You might have also noticed that I keep talking about what the audience may think or could perhaps feel. Tentative language is really important here because the audience are not a monolith and do not all react the same way. There is no doubt someone in the audience who 100% agrees with Mr. Birling and thinks that Eva Smith was just a good-for-nothing. Trust me, I have met those people in my real life: "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."

And you know what? Now that I think about it, you don't even actually need to phrase your sentences as "the audience think or feel X," because really you don't and can't know. The more important point that you can validate through reasoned analysis is what Priestley wants them to think or feel. So actually, the best phrasing is going to be something like: "At this point of the play, Priestley wants the audience to judge Mr. Birling's selfishness."

You can then take that even further by adding a link back to the writer's purpose: "At this point of the play, Priestley wants the audience to judge Mr. Birling's selfishness and begin to connect his selfishness with his political ideology of individualism. In this way, the audience's dislike of Mr. Birling becomes the beginnings of a dislike for individualism itself."

You can make that audience journey a big part of your introduction and then use it to shape your essay structure as a whole. Let's take, for example, this sample assessment question from AQA: "How does Priestley present Gerald's relationships with women?"

To track the audience's view here, your argument could look something like this—and this is me sort of condensing multiple paragraphs into sort of a summary argument:

"At first, Priestley guides the audience to view Gerald with some sympathy, as they might see his rescue of Daisy Renton as a kind and caring act. However, as the investigation continues, the audience realizes the unfair power that wealthy men have over working-class women, and they ultimately judge Gerald for using his wealth to exploit Eva."

Onto the next big idea, and that is directly related to Priestley making An Inspector Calls part of the detective subgenre of a crime play. In this genre, there is always an investigation of a crime, and by the end of the story, you discover who committed the crime. In my video about analyzing form in An Inspector Calls, I do this analysis of the crime play and how Priestley kind of subverts this genre, because technically no one really commits a crime—or, really, the point of the investigation is not figuring out who committed a particular crime. It's super interesting, and I'll link to the video in the description if you haven't learned about that before.

J.B. Priestley was a passionate socialist. He didn't write this play just to entertain people on a night out in 1946; he wrote it to put capitalism on trial. And who is the jury? The audience.

During the play, Inspector Goole essentially acts as the prosecution: he presents the evidence, he brings the witnesses forward, and he exposes the crimes committed against Eva Smith. But the Birlings can't really be legally punished. A lot of them didn't do anything that was actually illegal. And the whole point of Inspector Goole maybe not even being an inspector is that we don't even know if anyone's even coming for them. Instead, the ultimate verdict and judgment is left with the audience.

What this means for your essays goes back to what I was saying before about you not needing to just constantly state big emotion words for the audience reaction. Instead, you can explain the genre of the play—the crime play—and Priestley's intention to set the audience up as the judge and jury of this case, and use that lens as a means of analyzing what key messages Priestley wants the audience to take away from the play:

• What judgments are the audience making when they hear that Mrs. Birling refused to help Eva because she called herself Mrs. Birling? What is Priestley trying to teach his audience about the harms of class snobbery?

• What judgments are they making when Gerald tries to restart his engagement with Sheila and she refuses? What is Priestley wanting them to notice about who has learned their lesson and who hasn't?

Onto the last point I want to cover: the audience and dramatic irony. Now, I've done a whole video on this in detail and I will link that in the description, but I will recap the core point here and why it is helpful.

The play is set in 1912, but the audience are watching in 1945 onwards. That creates a dramatic irony where the audience knows things that the characters do not: the Titanic sank, World War I, World War II, etc. Rather than talking about the audience with those like emotion buzzwords of "angry," "sad," whatever, you can analyze the dramatic irony:

• What do the audience know?

• How does the information that they have impact the way they view the events in the play?

For example, when Mr. Birling insists that there will be "peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere" except, of course, in Russia, the audience knows that he could not be more wrong. How does that knowledge they have then impact the way they view Mr. Birling? In my Mr. Birling video, again linked in the description, I go through all the dramatic irony that he in particular uses and the mounting impact it has, going back to that idea of the audience journey and how it impacts them when he makes those mistakes again, and again, and again.

Now, you won't talk about dramatic irony with every Inspector Calls question that could ever be written, but there are a lot of them that you will. If the question involves Mr. Birling, dramatic irony better be involved. If the themes of class or social responsibility are involved, so too better be dramatic irony. And showing that you have a strong understanding of how that dramatic irony is shaping the audience's view of 1912 Britain and the values that they had is going to be really powerful in your essays.

Hopefully, from everything I've been through today, you can see that genuinely engaging with the impact on the audience in An Inspector Calls can be a challenging skill, but a key to really pushing your essays into that much higher level of insight that very few students are going to show, and will really help you with reaching those highest grades in English literature.