THEATER CHRONICLE
tioner, handing his bag to the maid and turning to face, once again,
the friendly image of opaque good nature presented to him by Wendy
Hiller, can only be disappointed that it sees no more of these people as
the play proceeds; it wonders what can have happened to them and
feels the boredom and restlessness that follow an unwanted interruption.
Later in the evening, when passion is understood to have awakened her,
Miss Hiller floats gracefully about the stage in arabesques of womanly
feeling, and still later she burns with anger and her eyes flash terrible
meanings (she has gotten to resemble her father), but all this appears a
little tawdry and professional after those first few insights into the clumsy
joys and lumbering sorrows of an amateur. Mr. and Mrs. Goetz, I
understand, are being congratulated for their integrity in resisting a
happy ending, but the temptations the devil labels for us as evil are not
usually the most dangerous.
An Inspector Calls
is a middle-class sermon on responsibility which
uses a detective-story plot formula, like bingo in the church basement,
to reach the un-spiritual man. A poor girl kills herself, and a comfortable
industrialist's household is disturbed at its revels by a detective, who
has been sent to affix the blame. Suspicion falls on each of five people
in turn, and each is found guilty; the detective turns out to be a super–
natural agent, and the curtain goes down. The symmetries of this plot
arc as Sunday-school strict as its message: one by one, as in a chain–
reaction, the actors are called upon to look smug, to start with guilt, to
feign unconcern, to bluster, to go to pieces, to admit all, and to bluster
again. It is Cock Robin done as a round. The sins and omissions and
cruelties are all offstage, in the past; and with the art of acting in its pres–
ent state of innocence, pantomine is hardly adequate to make a guilty
memory bear witness to guilt. Guilt, therefore, is revealed not by the action,
not by the actors' faces, but by the police-inspector, who comes to
force it out. The worm of conscience, here, is a worm indeed, and the play,
for all its firm structure, has a strangely soft and spineless character.
Fear of implication becomes a guide to conduct. Be careful what you
say, the characters keep warning each other. Be careful what you do,
Mr.
J.
B. Priestley, the author, admonishes them; watch your step with
Labor or God will give you a parking ticket.
Many people who saw
Command Decision
imagined that here too
they were witnessing a kind of moral
causerie-on
the expendability of
human life in war. What they actually saw, however, was a dramatiza–
tion of the
story
of expendability, which is quite a different matter. A
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