drama essay
... and makes sure that it will make the audience realise how wrong they may have been assuming future events. The play is set in an industrial city in the Midlands of 1912 concerns a wealthy industrial Arthur Birling, his family, the fiancé Gerald Croft and an Inspector. It shows how the family each help to destroy a young woman’s life, Eva Smith through their selfish and callous attitudes that results in her death. The play runs parallel to what was happening to society at the time. Each uncaring action/statement is backed up with ensuing consequences. In comparison “The Winslow Boy” is a domestic drama that not only deals with the tensions and unspoken conflicts within a family, but also offers that family as a metaphor for British society at large. It is a period piece both in being about a society on the brink of undergoing the cataclysm of World War One, and in being written when Britain, probably for the last time, might have been viewed as a homogeneous family, and one that had survived and been strengthened by the experience of the Second World War. Fourteen year old Ronnie Winslow is expelled from Naval College and sent home. His shocked family, parents Arthur and Grace, sister Catherine and brother Dickie, want the truth, was he expelled for forging a fellow cadet's name on a postal check and stealing his money? The boy's assurance that he did not is all the father needs to launch a crusade for justice to clear his son's name, a crusade that nearly costs the family everything. 1912 Edwardian England takes up the case of the "Winslow boy" versus the Admiralty (which because of its status as part of the royal government is considered immune from being sued) and it becomes a media circus, as Arthur Winslow whittles away the family's finances. Finally, in desperation, he turns to a famous barrister, Sir Robert Morton, an ambitious lawyer whom Catherine Winslow dislikes because of his stance on suffra...