Time and the Conways and Other Plays (I Have Been Here Before, An Inspector Calls, The Linden Tree)

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Synopsis 'Time and the Conways’ by JB Priestley follows the fortunes of one family over a period of years, and offers a moving perspective on the abstract nature of the past, present and future. It is 1919, the War is over and the Conway family are celebrating their daughter Kay’s 21st birthday. But her sudden premonition of their lives in 1937 casts a shadow over their dreams and expectations. This BBC Radio production features a distinguished cast including Marcia Warren, Stella Gonet, Belinda Sinclair, Amanda Redman and Toby Stephens. Series Classic Radio Theatre, Series Language English Country Great Britain Year of release 1994 Notes Originally broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 12 August 1994. Subjects Drama Credits Writer J B Priestley Cast Amanda Redman This act ends with a request from Kay to Alan to tell her something she thinks he knows. She quotes, in part and confusedly, the lines from Blake which Alan has spoken in Act Two. Mrs. Conway dismisses Kay's fears, patronisingly, as "all this birthday excitement". But once again, the act concludes with Kay and Alan together on the stage. He cannot yet tell her what she wants to hear (he does not, after all, know it himself yet - it is she alone who has correctly, if vaguely, foreseen the future). But he promises that one day "there will be - something" that he can tell her.

Designer Laura Hopkins, ably assisted by the beautifully nuanced lighting of Mark Henderson, makes a large ante-room at the Conways' family pile stunning. It comes over like two works of art, the first filled with opulent red furnishings and decor, the second far more puritanical and austere. The book that Alan, the oldest of the Conways, is going to lend Kay is almost certainly J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time. Priestley was continually interested in Dunne’s theory of time, exploring it in plays and essays throughout his career. An Experiment with Time posits exactly what Alan explains to Kay, with the additional claim that in dreams, our consciousness is able to experience the whole stretch of our existence, delivering precognitive visions of the future. Kay has this experience in Act III, apparently seeing some vision of Act II while Mrs. Conway is talking about how wonderful the future will be for the Conways. Of course, this is also the experience of the audience, throughout all of Act III. Having just come from the grim, shabby household of 1937, the jubilance of all the characters in 1919 rings false and discordant. As this is a play, what matters here most is the audience's general impression of a family whose initial closeness as a group reflects their closeness in age. But there is more definite information, for attentive audiences, in the case of the important matters of dating. This is established by Priestley's setting the acts in different years but on the same day of the year, and introducing a simple device (Kay's birthday) to remind us of this. The progression of the characters’ lives, which usually provides much of the interest of dramatic plots and is therefore desired by the audience, becomes instead something dreaded. The limited, forward impetus of time has been resisted, not only by simple manipulation of the dramatic structure but also by the alteration of audience sensibility that follows. Having seen the outcome of the characters’ lives, the audience can no longer be curious about it, and the attention of the audience can thus be focused elsewhere; it is focused, ultimately, on Kay.Priestley applies this to the standard three-act 1930s boulevard entertainment, so that act two of Time and the Conways runs concurrently with act one (only in a different spatial dimension), while acts three and one are simultaneous. All that considered, you may conclude that the play finishes before it begins, and there is no need to go to the theatre at all - except that it would be a shame to miss some very fine acting. Act Two plunges us into the shattered lives of the Conways exactly eighteen years later. Gathering in the same room where they were celebrating in Act One we see how their lives have failed in different ways. Robin has become a dissolute travelling salesman, estranged from his wife Joan, Madge has failed to realise her socialist dreams, Carol is dead, Hazel is married to the sadistic but wealthy Ernest. Kay has succeeded to a certain extent as an independent woman but has not realised her dreams of novel writing. Worst of all, Mrs Conway's fortune has been squandered, the family home is to be sold and the children's inheritance is gone. As the Act unfolds resentments and tensions explode and the Conways are split apart by misery and grief. Only Alan, the quietest of the family, seems to possess a quiet calm. In the final scene of the Act, Alan and Kay are left on stage and, as Kay expresses her misery Alan suggests to her that the secret of life is to understand its true reality – that the perception that Time is linear and that we have to grab and take what we can before we die is false. If we can see Time as eternally present, that at any given moment we are seeing only 'a cross section of ourselves,' then we can transcend our suffering and find no need to hurt or have conflict with other people. This makes the play strangely Chekhovian and Francesca Annis' optimistic but hopeless mother is straight out of the great Russian's stable. The actress is convincing in the part and does the most effective impression of Joan Plowright imaginable in portraying the older Mrs Conway. Gerald, who has come to explain Mrs. Conway's financial affairs to the family, arrives in the company of Ernest. It emerges that Mrs. Conway has an overdraft at the bank. Her income is from property (which needs renovation) and shares (which have fallen in value). The large amount of money left her by her husband, supposedly in trust for all the children, has been used up, apparently trying to help Robin in his various failed business schemes. Madge is furious, not least because she was refused help by Mrs. Conway when she tried to buy a partnership in a school.

It's a clever play - Priestly wrote some excellent books and drama. There's a touch of melodrama in it, and maybe some fatalism - but the content will stay with you. The acting (as are most British plays of this vintage) is superb. Claire Bloom (as the mother) is wonderfully touching, then catty, then dominant, the manipulative.In the course of arguing and reminiscing, the family discusses the death of Carol Conway sixteen years earlier. Ernest states his conviction that Carol was the best of the Conways. Robin arrives and begins drinking; he receives a warm welcome only from his mother. Gerald tries to remind the family of their mother’s precarious financial position, and Hazel asks Ernest to loan her mother the needed capital. Vengefully he refuses, denounces the Conways, and moves to leave. Hazel at first refuses to accompany him, then fearfully gives in. Mrs. Conway slaps Ernest in the face before he leaves. The rest of the family renew their arguing. Gerald, Alan, and Joan depart. Madge reminds her mother of a time when she deliberately ruined Madge’s chance for a match with Gerald. Mrs. Conway declares that her once-promising children have amounted to nothing. Family members continue to depart until Alan and Kay are alone. Alan attempts to console the despondent Kay by describing for her a theory of time, according to which one’s life is a consistent whole with only a small portion in view at any moment: “Time doesn’t destroy anything. It merely moves us on—in this life—from one peephole to the next.” He leaves Kay sitting at the window alone as the curtain drops.

Just saw this for the first time in some thirty years... Priestley wrote three 'Time' plays: "Dangerous Corners" is the best known other one (I think). He's also the author of "An Inspector Calls" which manages to be paranormal without spooky. The English author J. B. Priestley wrote a number of dramas during the 1930s and 40s, which have come to be known as his Time Plays. [1] They are so called because each constructs its plot around a particular concept of time. In the plays, various theories of time become a central theatrical device of the play, the characters' lives being affected by how they react to the unusual temporal landscape they encounter. [2] Goold takes no liberties with Priestley’s structure or text, and the action for the most part is played out on Laura Hopkins’s period drawing room set. But the experimental leanings of the director flourish at the end of each act, when he eerily suggests the theory of time that Priestley studied, leading to a highly inventive, chilling conclusion.J B Priestley gave the National Theatre one of its biggest ever hits with Stephen Daldry's revival of An Inspector Calls, which is still touring 17 years on.

Priestley’s interest in the nature of time fuelled the writing of this play in 1937, in which he explores the idea that our present and our future exist simultaneously, rather than one being an unalterable consequence of the other. He wraps up this notion in the story of the wealthy Conway family, whom we meet in 1919 as daughter Kay is celebrating her 21st birthday with a night of parlour games in the family home, along with her mother and siblings. Life is rosy; son Robin has just left the army and returned home, and each of the four Conway daughters has reason to believe in a bright future. Only their bookish, stuttering brother Alan (Paul Ready) seems fixed in the present, rather than yearning for the rewards of the future. But at the end of act one, Hattie Morahan’s Kay has a vision of the life that awaits them, and it is considerably less palatable than they like to imagine. Mr. Gradgrind has a wife, for much of the story of Hard Times, but she never interferes in his "system" of bringing up his children. We know that Mr. Conway has very different ideas from his wife, and the children have not been brought up in ways that help them to develop their own best qualities. Rather, they have been forced to become what Mr. Gradgrind/Mrs. Conway want them to be, either accepting this and being unhappy, or rebelling against it, and still being unhappy. Comment on the importance of the ideas of homes in the two works. This could be further extended by commenting on the importance, in each work, of the towns where the stories are set: grim industrial Coketown and middle-class suburban Newlingham. As for this one ..we meet the Conways in 1919, at a daughter's 21st birthday. The Conways are attractive, well-liked, affluent, and survived the war well (with the exception of the father). They banter with each other, tease each other a little - brother Robin comes home that night, friend Gerald brings in a man who's been dying to meet them...Mrs. Conway, who is an accomplished singer, is now expected to entertain the guests, and the other characters follow her off stage, except for Kay and Carol, who speak of their ambitions. Time and the Conways is a British play written by J. B. Priestley in 1937 illustrating J. W. Dunne's Theory of Time through the experience of a moneyed Yorkshire family, the Conways, over a period of nineteen years from 1919 to 1937. Widely regarded as one of the best of Priestley's Time Plays, a series of pieces for theatre which played with different concepts of Time (the others including I Have Been Here Before, Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls), [1] it continues to be revived in the UK regularly. [2] Plot [ edit ] The play works on the level of a universal human tragedy and a powerful portrait of the history of Britain between the Wars. Priestley shows how through a process of complacency and class arrogance, Britain allowed itself to decline and collapse between 1919 and 1937, instead of realizing the availability of immense creative and humanistic potential accessible during the post-war (theGreat War) generation. Priestley could clearly see the tide of history leading towards another major European conflict as he has his character Ernest comment in 1937 that they are coming to ‘the next war’.