An Inspector Calls

Last night, I finally got to see An Inspector Calls. I studied this as one of my GCSE English Lit texts along with Macbeth and A Mayor of Casterbridge. It amused me at the time that the only one of this I saw in the theatre during my GCSE courses was in fact A Mayor of Casterbridge

I loved An Inspector Calls when we studied it and its message of 'Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee'. Thus I've long wanted to see it so when I noticed that it was on at The New Theatre this week I decided that I wanted to go. My first suggestion was to go on the Thursday but mum pointed out that this is Ascension Day so eventually we booked tickets for the Wednesday night. Sean Cavanagh (husband to the University Chaplain Lorraine, a director of Riding Lights and a West End set designer) told me it was a very good production and so I was looking for it.

Unfortunately, my idea of a good production and Sean's appear to differ. I could see why a set designer would appreciate it, but felt on the whole it was over done.

The thing is that An Inspector Calls only requires a very basic set -- a Dining Room -- but this production had gone much beyond that. The set was a mansion which opened part way through the first scene (when the Inspector arrived) but which was out of scale with characters. It was used to good effect to demonstrate the fact that the Birling's world was destroyed by the Inspector's visit and they way in which the parents and Gerald Croft (the daughter's fiancé) start trying to rebuild their life as though nothing had happened. However, this seemed to over egg the cake to me. The play, IMO, speaks for myself.

Secondly, the Inspector was too aggressive and dramatic. My impression from reading the script is of a much more controlled character who is much more sinister. The Goole/Ghoul suggestion wasn't at all apparent.

There were also various extraneous people around, like a young kid who spent most of the production being very still wearing the Inspector's hat. Reading the programme afterwards, it turned out that the idea of the production was that the play (set in 1912) was being acted out in 1945 to help people decide whether to vote for Churchill or Attlee. It was an interesting idea, but didn't really come off. I thought it started with an air raid siren, but it wasn't at all clear what that, or the kids playing the street had to do with the rest of it.

I still loved it, because it is a wonderful play, but that was despite the production.

Mum had a similar reaction -- she's never studied it, but saw it in Crewe 33 years ago and felt that that was a much more subtle and therefore more sinister production.

Change

I'm currently doing a Fresh Expressions Course with people from my church along with others from the Dioceses of Llandaf and Monmouth and the Methodists in this part of the world.

At the session this week, one of the things we talked about related to change and a bell curve was given divided up into Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. The point was that to initiate change in a congregation one had to work mainly with the middle three groups -- going too much with the innovators could in fact backfire. In many ways, I could see the point.

We were asked whether we were Innovators and a few responded. Then we were asked if any of us were Laggards and I was the only who responded. Someone pointed out that the people attending such a course were likely to be Innovators or Early Adopters. I made the point that in fact at different points and about different things we might react different.

As I've thought about this for the last couple of days, I've come to be more dubious about this blanket categorisation.

I am by basic inclination a laggard. I don't like change and certainly not change for change's sake. My reaction to An Inspector Calls last night is an example of that -- it wasn't how I'd imagined it from the script so I wasn't keen. Similarly, those of you who were present when MethSoc went to see the first Harry Potter will remember my reaction to change there! And while I laugh and am disappointed by those in churches who make visitors unwelcome by telling them they've sat in 'their seat', I've had that reaction to people who have sat in 'my seat' in the library. I don't act on it, but it's there.

Whether I accept change depends a lot more on whether I understand the logic of it. For example, when I went to our sister church for services soon after our new vicar arrived, I wanted to rearrange the seating. Although it is a rectangular space, the altar is in one of the corners and to my mind it made most sense to have the chairs facing that way, but they were set out parallel to two of the walls. The new vicar agreed with me but was cautious about changing something to soon, but eventually cracked as she felt she wasn't communicating with one part of the church. She changed the layout and a couple of people complained the first week that they didn't know where to sit. Since then they've been fine. But I can sympathise with that reaction, even though I was a major proponent of the change.

In church situations, it can be set out as being about our comfort versus mission but often the innovators are in fact asking for things to be changed to what they are comfortable with.

One of the sensible things said in the course was that you needed to change values before you changed structures -- while changing structures is superficially easier than changing values, just changing structures without address the values leaves a lot of people hurt. This makes a lot of sense to me. If I'm onside with why things need to be changed, I'm a lot more likely to be happy with the change.