Drag the boxes onto the matching gaps.- provincial
- large
- portentous
- white
- pretty
- harder
- excited
- prosperous
- evening
- EDNA
- champagne
- assertive
- furniture
- superior
- cosy
- cigar
- ease
- pleased
- port
- town
- spring
- attractive
- cold
- intimate
It is an evening in
, 1912.
ACT ONE
The dining room is of a fairly suburban house, belonging to a manufacturer.
It has a good solid of the period.
The general effect is substantial and heavily comfortable but not and homelike. (if a realistic set is used, then it should be swung back, as it was in the production at the new theatre. By doing this, you can have the dining-table centre downstage during act one, when it is needed there, and then swinging back, can reveal the fireplace for act two, and then for act three can show a small table with a telephone on it, downstage of the fireplace; and by this time the dining-table and it chairs have moved well upstage. Producers who wish to avoid this tricky business, which involves two re-settings of the scene and some very accurate adjustments of the extra flats necessary would be well advised to dispense with an ordinary realistic set if only because the dining-table becomes a nuisance. The lighting should be pink and until the INSPECTOR arrives and then it should be brighter and .)
At rise of curtain, the four Birling's and Gerald are seated at the table, with Arthur Birling at one end, his wife at the other, Eric downstage and Sheila and Gerald seated upstage.
, the parlourmaid, is just clearing the table, which has no cloth, of the dessert plates and glasses,etc, and then replacing them with decanter of , box and cigarettes. Port glasses are already on the table. All five are in dress of the period, the men in tails and ties, not dinner-jackets. Arthur Birling is a heavy-looking, rather man in this middle fifties with fairly easy manners but rather in this speech. His wife is about fifty, a rather woman and her husband's social . Sheila is a girl in her early twenties, very pleased with life and rather . Gerald croft is a chap about thirty, rather too manly to be a dandy but very much the well-bred young man-about-. Eric is in his early twenties, not quite at , half shy, half . At the moment they have all had a good dinner, are celebrating a special occasion, and are with themselves.