“The Point Is, You Don’t Seem to Have Learnt Anything”: Reimagining J.B. Priestley’s<i>An Inspector Calls</i>as a Brechtian<i>Lehrstück</i>for the Middle Classes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the applicability of Bertolt Brecht’s most radical formal innovation, the Lehrstück or learning play, to a play that is neither written in the Brechtian tradition nor ostensibly a Lehrstück itself. J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1944) is a popular play often considered “political” by reviewers, yet it proposes no fundamental change to the political landscape its seeks to critique. Brecht’s Lehrstück, which dissolves the boundary between actor and spectator, offers a different mode of performance that actively confronts performers with the implications of their fictional counterparts and invites reflection on how the problems presented might be addressed. The article identifies the political shortcomings of Priestley’s play and introduces Brechtian categories into the analysis and performance of the play before radicalizing these by transforming An Inspector Calls into a Lehrstück. The process the play undergoes signals the liveliness and durability of this dramaturgical form and offers an example of how Brecht can remain productive in a contemporary theatre context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".