Eric Birling: the one nobody was watching

Eric Birling is at the dinner table from the first minute of the play. He laughs at nothing, drinks a little too much, and his parents pay him no attention. Yet he is carrying the worst secret in the house. Priestley hides him in plain sight until the last act, and this video is about what that hiding does to the people watching.

Should the evening itself be hazy, An Inspector Calls: An overview walks through it in order. This video watches the son.

A plant is a detail a writer places early so that it pays off later. Eric's Act One is full of them - and every one looks like nothing. In the middle of the celebration he laughs out loud, and when Sheila asks why, he has no answer. I don't know - really. Suddenly I felt I just had to laugh. He has been drinking, and Sheila is the one who notices. His parents let it pass without a word. And when Birling explains why he sacked Eva, Eric is the one who objects. Why shouldn't they try for higher wages? Three small moments, and in Act One none of them seems to matter. Which of the three hints at Eric's conscience rather than his secret? The wages question. He is right, early, and nobody listens, so Priestley plants Eric's conscience before the audience learns what he did.

In Act Three, the plants pay off. The drink explains the night he met Eva, and even now he cannot say it straight. I was in that state when a chap easily turns nasty. The way he talks about her gives him away too. I wasn't in love with her or anything - but I liked her - she was pretty and a good sport. A good sport is what you call someone who joins in a game. Eric uses it about a woman he used - and it tells you how little he saw her. He explains his secret as a family fault. Because you're not the kind of father a chap could go to when he's in trouble - that's why. Then he learns that his mother turned Eva away, and every plant from Act One lands at once. Then - you killed her. Why does Priestley hold Eric back until the last act, instead of letting him confess earlier?

So the reveal lands on the audience as well as on the family. The Act One nothings were plants, and the people watching ignored him too.

And after the hoax is exposed, Eric holds his ground anyway. The girl's dead and we all helped to kill her - and that's what matters.

Eric and Gerald are two young men in the same story, and they blur together. But they did very different things. Gerald met Daisy Renton in a bar, took her away from a drunk alderman, and kept her in a friend's flat as his mistress through the spring and summer. He ended it himself. Eric met her in the same bar in the autumn. He was drunk, he forced his way into her room, and she became pregnant. He stole money for her, and she refused it. Now, take one action on its own. Somebody gave her somewhere to live, then stopped when it suited him. Whose action is that, Gerald's or Eric's? Gerald's. The flat is his link, and the baby and the stolen money are Eric's. One examiner's report puts the result plainly: some essays confused characters or attributed quotations inaccurately - particularly between Gerald and Eric - which weakened the overall argument. In plain words, a quotation pinned on the wrong young man knocks down the point it was meant to hold up. So the fix is to learn each man's link as one plain line. Gerald, the flat. Eric, the baby and the stolen money.

In Eva's own life, Eric's link came fourth - and the play shows it to you last of all. One chain, five links: every link hands her on to the next. Eric is the link nobody was watching.

Finish two of Eric's lines, then apply the idea to something new. Eric's odd laugh: suddenly I felt I just had to what? Laugh. Suddenly I felt I just had to laugh, and it is a plant, not a joke. Next, whose line: I was in that state when a chap easily turns nasty. Eric or Gerald? Eric. It is the nearest he comes to saying what he did that night. Now a new case: Eric is offstage for almost all of Act Two. What does that set up? His return at the end of that act, straight into his mother's demand for the father's punishment. The exit is a plant too. The son who laughed at nothing at the dinner table was carrying the worst secret in the house all along.

Thumbs-up this one once Eric and Gerald can never trade places in your head. If they still blur, the video on Gerald comes next and sharpens the split from his side.

Next in the chapter: Gerald Croft, the outsider who stays outside.

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