An Inspector Calls

[smurfchops]

David Thewlis, Miranda Richardson…. Recorded this and just watched it, I really enjoyed it but really didn’t understand the ending . ( nothing new there)… . can someone help?

[bobbinwales]

There was no death. Evie Smith? Maybe even the inspector was just in there minds. Guilty consciences?

[Buenchico]

There's an excellent plot summary on the BBC website. (Skip to page 5 for the ending):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zxhsyrd/revision/1

Priestley used a trick, that's been used by others many times before and since, of making the audience think that everything's clear cut and then adding a twist to confound them. (Think of the endings of movies like 'The Sixth Sense'). Throughout most of the play, nobody doubts that the inspector is real but then it turns out that there's no such person among the local police force and that none of the events seem to have happened at all. Just when it appears that it was all a hoax though, the whole sequence of events starts to occur for real. (Dickens used a similar trick in The Signalman, where it appears that he death in the tunnel that the signalman sees is only in his imagination, before it turns out that he's foreseeing his own death).

[bobbinwales]

Thanks buenchico.am sure we did the book at school or maybe I saw a film with Alistair sim or someone like that.
There was a similar theme when someone on a plane dreamt about a sequence of event.s and a plane crash and then the same events start to unfold

[tiggerblue10]

We read the book at school and remember that there was a big twist at the end.