The play is a three-act morality play which takes place on a single night on 5 April 1912. The play focuses on the prosperous upper middle-class Birling family, who live in a comfortable home in the fictional town of Brumley, "an industrial city in the north Midlands". The family is visited by a man calling himself Inspector Goole, who questions the family about the suicide of a young working-class woman in her mid-twenties. Long considered part of the repertory of classic drawing room theatre, the play has also been hailed as a scathing criticism of the hypocrisies of Victorian and Edwardian English society.
