His wartime broadcasts 'Postcripts' brought comfort to the nation in the darkest days of WW2 but probably his most successful medium immediately before and after the war was his plays in which he was constantly exploring his fascination with time. In after 25 years of marriage but also a number of affairs, Priestley was divorced by his wife. He was at this stage involved with Jacquetta Hawkes, an archaeologist and travel writer and the wife of an eminent Professor of Archaeology at Oxford.
A rather messy divorce followed citing Priestley as co-respondent and they were then married in The following is a list of the UK works of J. For the the titles we currently have in stock see here. The Chapman of Rhymes First issue date: Brief Diversions First issue date: Bowes and Bowes, Cambridge Notes:. Papers from Lilliput First issue date: I for One First issue date: The Bodley Head, London Notes:. Figures in Modern Literature First issue date: The English Comic Characters First issue date: The Bodley Head, London Notes: Essays of To-day And Yesterday First issue date: George Meredith First issue date: These Diversion First issue date: Adam in Moonshine First issue date: The author's first novel.
Benighted First issue date: Open House First issue date: These Diversions First issue date: The English Novel First issue date: Thomas Love Peacock First issue date: English Humour First issue date: Longmans, Green and Co. Jointly written with Hugh Walpole, takes the form of an exchange of letters. The Balconinney and Other Essays First issue date: A further collection of essays. The Good Companions First issue date: The major breakthrough for JBP - a novel of a group of travelling players. Angel Pavement First issue date: The Town Major of Miracourt First issue date: Published as a limited edition of signed by author, in slipcase.
Dangerous Corner First issue date: Faraway First issue date: Self-Selected Essays First issue date: Albert Goes Through First issue date: Illustrated by Edmund Blampied, dustwrapper by Edmund Blampied. The Roundabout First issue date: Wonder Hero First issue date: Eden End First issue date: English Journey First issue date: An contemporary account of a journey round England and an important piece of social history. Laburnum Grove First issue date: Cornelius First issue date: Duet in Floodlight First issue date: Bees on the Boatdeck First issue date: Charles Dickens First issue date: Thomas Nelson, London Notes:.
Spring Tide First issue date: They Walk in the City: The Lovers in the Stone Forest First issue date: Midnight on the Desert First issue date: First volume of autobiography. Mystery of Greenfingers First issue date: Samuel French, London Notes:. People at Sea First issue date: Time And The Conways First issue date: A time play Also issued in a Samuel French acting edition. Two Time Plays First issue date: The Doomsday Men First issue date: When we are Married First issue date: Also published in an acting edition by Samuel French.
Johnson Over Jordan First issue date: The Heinemann edition includes an essay 'All about it'. Let the People Sing First issue date: Commissioned by the BBC for broadcasting, Priestley wrote more than they could handle and after editing only a third was broadcast. Rain Upon Godshill First issue date: Second volume of autobiography. Postscripts First issue date: Transcripts of radio talks - specifically described as not 'essays' - given on national radio in UK each Sunday evening between June and October, ,.
The Long Mirror First issue date: Written for the repertory company of The Playhouse at Oxford during and first performed there - not know if separately published but appears in several collections - a play about ESP and second sight,. Out of the People First issue date: A story of - and for - Wartime First issue date: Goodnight Children First issue date: An account of the work of women, both in the armed forces and in industry, during WW2. A Novel about an Aircraft Factory First issue date: Desert Highway First issue date: Manpower First issue date: Issued in paper wrappers, the story of Great Britain's mobilisation of labour for war.
Authorship not attributed in text. They Came to a City First issue date: Letter to a Returning Serviceman First issue date: Home and Van Thal Ltd. Three Men in New Suits First issue date: Bright Day First issue date: Russian Journey First issue date: An Inspector Calls First issue date: Jenny Villiers First issue date: Music at Night First issue date: The Arts Under Socialism - being a lecture given to the Fabian Society with a postcript on what the government should do for the arts here and now First issue date: Transcript of a lecture - the title says it all.
The Rose and Crown First issue date: Theatre Outlook First issue date: Nicholson and Watson, London Notes:. Pan Books, London Notes: First in this collection. The Golden Fleece First issue date: The Linden Tree First issue date: The Olympians opera libretto, music by Arthur Bliss First issue date: Delight First issue date: Home is Tomorrow First issue date: Bright Shadow First issue date: Summer Day's Dream First issue date: Festival at Farbridge First issue date: There was now arriving, to dominate the centre, a new kind of criticism, colder and harder, intolerant in manner, arrogant in tone, and so immediately attractive to intellectual youth, itself intolerant and arrogant.
It was theological and absolutist: Only a small amount of writing, written by and for an elite, was Literature, all else was rubbish. These new critics were like members of a grim little secret society, making out lists of the few who would be allowed to survive, the many who must be assassinated. What was produced by the extrovert, facing the outer world, was simply so much popular entertainment, not Literature at all.
J. B. Priestley
No longer a man and a brother. Such hostilities, as expressed by Woolf, originated in both class and professional snobbery as much as any kind of hardline position on the aesthetics of literature. He was also completely au fait with developments in European literature and theatre, as is evidenced by his wide-ranging intellectual work, Literature and Western 20 Life, politics and theory Man In fact, it is in this book that he best sums up his attitude to the modernist phase: The truth is that. Literature clearly had a new role, but Priestley felt that the modernists lacked the appropriate level of social analysis and worked to limited notions of what constituted literature.
Eliot — were not interested or knowledgeable enough about the pragmatics of theatre. The dynamics of live theatre production had to be prioritised over the desire to be poetic. He battled with them in the press and in his other writings: Just as an analysis of class difference lies, to some extent, at the root of the barrage of academic criticism aimed at Priestley as a writer, so too he saw that the entrenchment of the class system in the fabric of English life, had not been destroyed by the war to the level that many had hoped it would be see McKibbin There was a time around , when we were able to convince a lot of people that only a diseased and rotten society 22 Life, politics and theory could have thrown up a Hitler, but since then there has been a huge campaign telling us day and night that it was Hitler who somehow produced, presumably from his box of watercolours, any disease and rottenness there may be in our society.
His analysis has a Marxist flavour in terms of its expressed understanding of the interrelationship between the economy, social power and cultural production. Privilege was tied into an embedded class system which even the circumstances of war could not undermine: He criticised George Bernard Shaw for believing that a redistribution of wealth would necessarily produce a more equal society.
I have heard Bernard Shaw argue eloquently against the smallest inequalities in income, and demonstrate that anything short of genuine equality of pay all round will keep us entangled in this sticky web of money and poison all our relations with one another. But Shaw appears to believe in privilege.
And this will not do. He has never lived in a society in which money did not mean much but privilege meant a great deal. An Inspector Calls or They Came to a City demand of the audience that they consider their own role in the maintenance of the class system and suggests an appraisal of alternative social structures and modes of behaviour.
He wrote and campaigned fervently for CND but resigned after the organisation became established and was run through large and more democratic meetings. The HLRS had been set up in as a direct result of the Wolfenden Report, a government commissioned report which called for a liberalisation of the laws discriminating against homosexuals Weeks His assaults on the theatre industry were more frequently focused on a critique of its structure, the concentration of ownership and the attitude of the state to the arts in general: His work for the Albany Trust was inspired by more than a simple desire to change the nature of what was or was not being put on in the London theatres.
His association with the organisation signifies a craving, at a time when any argument for gay rights could cause serious damage to his public image, for real legalistic change that would bring about social change. Priestley was involved in numerous political organisations and for each he wrote and publicised their causes: Just as his personality and career were complex and multilayered, so too were the ways in which he expressed his deepening but constantly developing beliefs. Similarly, his political beliefs developed, deepened and became more strongly enveloped in his thinking about the human psyche as his career progressed.
Equally 26 Life, politics and theory contradictory, some biographies refer to his extra-marital affairs at the same time as focusing on the emotional depth and domestic complexities of his marriages and dedication to his familial relationships. He was a key twentieth century playwright, a fact recognised by the industry but not by the academy, for whom the mid-twentieth century British theatre has been traditionally seen as commercialised and lacking invention. Each year sees a significant number of productions of his plays, in both professional and amateur theatres all over the world: What is clear is that there is no other British playwright of his generation who engaged so deeply with the dynamics of cultural production and the function and practice of theatre.
I left other kinds of writing, which offered me a safe living and far more peace of mind. And more than once. He was also as familiar with theatrical activity in Europe and the United States as he was with theatre in England. Priestley wrote both critically and with affection about clowns and stand-up performers as well as actors Priestley , , but noted in the late s that variety theatre had somewhat lost its edge Priestley Similarly, when in he writes about an experience of visiting a touring show in the provinces, he not only gently mocks the outdated appearance of the performances and the simplicity of presentation, but also asserts that such shows are part of the richness of the theatre experience and must not be lost to progress or modernisation.
When she swept out, you could have sworn that the black night had already swallowed her; it was absurd to think that she was behind that little curtain, having a nip of something and keeping her eye on the takings. If her patrons do not rally around her and I can promise for one , then Drama is dead. Equally, he saw drama as a component of a live art form, not as literature. This is something that many critics.
I believe that a large section of the Theatre should be taken out of the control of commercial managements. British theatre in the first half of the twentieth century was a many-layered industry, largely framed by its commercial status. The industry included provincial theatres, variety venues, London and West End theatres as well as privately run subscription and club theatres — the independent sector see Davies ; Gale , a, b; Marshall The British theatre of this period was 30 Life, politics and theory driven largely by market forces and this was something which Priestley, along with other playwrights who had gone before him, like Granville Barker and G.
Shaw, objected to see Kennedy West End theatres, by the end of the interwar period, were almost entirely owned and run by a small and tightly knit management cartel. Members of one company often sat on the managerial boards of another and so the perception of a monopoly was not unfounded. Where the Victorian West End was dominated — not always unproblematically so — by actormanagers, such as Beerbohm Tree or Henry Irving, the post period saw theatres moving outside the field of artist-led The function and practice of theatre 31 management.
What I condemn is the property system that allows public amenities and a communal art to be controlled by persons who happen to be rich enough to acquire playhouses. But he also understood the complexities of, and was deeply concerned by, this style of investment in cultural assets. In the West End. Clearly for the owner this is gambling without losing. It stands to reason that only desperate men — and the producing manager is a desperate man these days — would accept such monstrous terms.
But in many West End theatres now, the producing manager pays the salaries. It was the production company, not the building owners, who stood to lose out if a production was unsuccessful. Priestley also campaigned against the taxation of theatrical productions, which impacted on the production managements, not the building owners. By , the tax was levied at Such speculative attitudes to production were less likely by the s, although companies such as the new English Stage Company at the Royal Court theatre could receive funding from the Arts Council and so be less commercially oriented see Roberts West End theatres could often earn more money than they originally cost to build, but it was the owners of the real estate who profited from this not the theatre artists Priestley b: For Priestley the government was negligent in maintaining the imposition of the Entertainment Tax at such a high levy.
The great questions will suddenly change their form if not their urgency. Will Chaplin finish his new picture? Has Garbo retired to Switzerland? Both the emergent film industries and celebrity cultures in Britain and North America were reliant on their respective theatre industries, especially during the s and s, and yet they had no real economic relationship with them; cinema benefited from theatre but it was rarely a reciprocal arrangement.
The function and practice of theatre 35 For Priestley, the long run system whereby productions of plays which had made a strong initial impact were kept running, because they continued to make a steady profit for the management, inhibited the development of actors and playwrights alike. If such a play can be kept going for a year or so.
Other Works
And the visitors pack in to see a mechanical performance, long stereotyped. No production is worth seeing after it has been running, without a break, for a year. Such idealistic expectations drove his theatre work. Equally, by this time the ownership and management of theatres was concentrated and fewer new plays were going into production. In the late s he stated: We are better off because we have created new audiences with a sharp appetite for good drama, and directors, players, and designers are crying out for serious work, and young playwrights by the dozen are dipping or chewing their pens.
It is, some of us feel, Now or Never for the English Theatre. It was in fact here that one often found productions of foreign plays Priestley b: Like the best continental subsidised theatres, the best amateur theatre was thriving and various, frequently experimented, and yet found a consistent and dedicated audience: This was also his criticism of the British theatre as a whole, that it was plagued by economic instability and a lack of sense of its own place in society. We have to prove that it is valuable and unique, that it does something supremely well worth doing, and that nothing else can take its place.
On the one hand he played on the idea that there was something almost magical about theatre, that the whole was equal to more than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, he proposed very pragmatic solutions to the problems of organisation and economics. There is no more enchanting box of tricks in the world than a theatre, especially a theatre that makes its own scenery and costumes.
You all start together on a new level, and come away from it feeling refreshed, as one does when that curse of our English life — our class system — has been temporarily removed. The Theatre and You, In works such as The Good Companions , Jenny Villiers and Lost Empires Priestley uses theatre and performance as a central focal point in narratives driven by themes such as The function and practice of theatre 39 community, human connectivity, memory and loss. The Good Companions is examined later in this volume see Chapter 6 , but its story — of people from different classes and social backgrounds, being brought together through their engagement with theatre — resonates with his ideas about the ways in which theatre has the power to make humans connect emotionally and practically, in a precarious post-war world.
Underpinning the novel is a desire to narrativise the theatre as a community in and of itself, but also to de-romanticise the processes involved in performance. As with An Inspector Calls see Chapter 7 the return to this historical moment is a device for social criticism Braine The York Theatre Royal production was performed as a musical and divided into two acts of eleven and eight scenes respectively. Of the nineteen scenes, eighteen have different locations, and of these ten are theatre spaces ranging from backstage, onstage and in the scene dock of six different theatres.
The Good Old Days aimed to replicate, albeit in a somewhat sterilised manner, the vitality of the Victorian and Edwardian music hall. The stage and television versions used different dominant themes in their adaptations of the original Priestley novel: The English Repertory theatres had blossomed during the early part of the century, but by , there were comparatively few left.
Some, such as Birmingham and the Gaiety and Rusholme Repertory in Manchester, were more experimental in their choice of repertoire, promoting the work, both on their home ground and on tour, of new playwrights and experimenting with production techniques see Gardner ; Rowell and Jackson Again, there is a focus on process, as Pike deconstructs the experience of rehearsal. Two things about rehearsal that are wonderful.
A ghost story of the theatre ran for two weeks with a cast which included Patrick Troughton, Pamela Brown and Yvonne Mitchell. The play was scheduled for productions in Norway and Denmark and under consideration for production by Alexander Tairov at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow.
I know it has always been about to die. What then follows are a series of dream and timeshift sequences in which Cheveril plays witness to the comings and goings of a theatre company working at the same theatre during the s. Vision and theory combined: Such companies would be run by experienced professional artists — he uses Basil Dean, Michael Macowan and Tyrone Guthrie as examples of possible artistic directors.
Workers from these theatres would transfer to other theatres countrywide in order to skills-share: For Priestley Priestley b: Priestley wanted the organisation of theatre culture to be networked and this involved provision in educational institutions. He proposed what was then a radical rethink of the ways in which drama and theatre featured as part of the curriculum in higher education.
A remarkably progressive vision, he urged for these departments to have a real working relationship with professional practice which they could explore through student placements and through workshops with playwrights and critics. These civic theatres should be seen as part of a package of public amenities and should have no less status than public parks, galleries and libraries.
He proposed that such communities could arrange transport and tours between towns and so share the costs of rehearsal and production, capitalising as much as possible on theatre companies already functioning well in the area. In this he shared in common ideas which Shaw, William Archer and Granville Barker had proposed before him. Among the enemies of the Theatre we must still include the British Government, which, with the hearty approval of all parties does not care whether the Theatre lives or dies as long as it pays the ferocious tax imposed upon it.
The State is really the greatest shareholder in all our theatrical enterprises, and a shareholder who invests nothing, takes no interest in what is being created, but yet contrives to grab between a third and a quarter of all the takings at the box office. Even when everybody else concerned is losing money, the Treasury is still taking its fat cut. The state should encourage good publishing houses, book shops, and provide concert halls, opera houses and theatres as a sign of its appreciation of the importance of art.
He wanted the state to set up committees which would enable rather than inhibit: The only books, music and pictures that have ever been worth a damn were written, composed, painted at a time when the Czars. I do not want books, plays and symphonic poems written around communal wash-houses. This links Priestley directly to the progressive thinkers of his age — those who created the community oriented Welfare State see Addison Priestley as theatre producer I enjoyed working in the Theatre but never saw it, as so many people did then, as a glittering playground.
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I disliked the West End Theatre in its glamour-gossip-column aspect. Though often successful, I was never a fashionable playwright. So far as I appealed to any particular class, I would say this was the professional middle class. This possibly explains why I was so widely and often produced abroad, where Theatre-going tended to be more serious — not so much a party-night-out affair as it was in the West End. Guardian, 5 April , quoted in Priestley Neither his political leanings nor his aesthetic beliefs were in tune with those — politically more conservative — who had managerial control of what was, or was not, produced in the commercial sector of the British theatre industry.
This is not to say that other playwrights of his generation did not also suffer under such a system: Within this system of cultural production, a playwright was only ever as good as their last play. It should also be pointed out that as a shrewd businessman, he made money from this venture: In his autobiography Margin Released, which contains the most about his theatre work, he pointed to the fact that G.
At the time Shaw was declaring that any manager who revived his plays at cheap prices would make a fortune. He was quite wrong. Just as his initial collaboration with Mitchelhill had helped to solidify his reputation as a playwright see Cotes , so too had this venture enabled him to prove his theory that the playwright did not have to be a passive participant in the processes of production. I was never a showman. I prefer the legitimate stage to be quiet, solid, bourgeois. His writings on theatre history and dramatic literature expose a sophisticated transhistorical knowledge of the work of both European playwrights and theories of playwriting.
As was the case with other forms of writing, Priestley took a very practical approach to both his critiques of their work and to the ensuing advice he gave to would-be playwrights. He insisted that playwrights had an artistic duty not to pander to the tastes of commercial production managements. Bring life into Theatre, the Theatre into life. Think in terms of action, for though plays are mostly dialogue, the talk should be moving towards an action. Try to have a continuous and varied series of little dramas within your big drama; the ability to write like this marks the born dramatist.
If I were beginning again I would move in the opposite direction, towards more elaborate construction and even greater intimacy, taking a few characters through an intricate and ironic dance of relationships. He saw the contemporary management of theatre production as working against the creativity of playwriting; the playwright was supposed to write the play and then submit it for production, and it was often the case that the relationship between the The function and practice of theatre 53 playwright and the production of their play ended at this point.
His encouragement of playwrights to take an active role in the process of production was underpinned by his belief that this was one way of subverting a situation whereby the success or failure of theatrical production is largely determined by chance and accident. You feel you have one foot in the playhouse and the other in the stock exchange. All this has nothing to do with the dramatic art; it is not even sensible business.
After all it is not easy to write a good play. There was very little movement between employers and so critics usually worked for the same newspaper over a substantial number of years. Some, such as Charles Morgan, H. Chance Newton and St John Ervine, either had also been actors or were playwrights themselves, but the majority, certainly by the s, considered themselves to be full-time critics, attending the openings of new 54 Life, politics and theory productions and sometimes reviewing transfers of successful ones. As the period progressed, critics moved more towards a form of criticism which fed into celebritised culture, commenting on gossip and the fashionable.
Although an overgeneralised analysis, it contains a strong element of truth. His feeling was that critics should not pander to this culture but should take the art of criticism more seriously. Without knowing what they are doing, quite a number of our dramatic critics are busy hindering and not helping the serious Theatre. Many critics assume that their readers are half-witted. They are careful to warn them off any play that has a glimmer of intelligence about it. The result is they are no longer on the side of serious Theatre. Theatre is The function and practice of theatre 55 battling against horribly heavy odds.
Keep right out, or join in Mr Critic, but do not interfere on the wrong side. Spectator, 19 April , quoted in Priestley Priestley was not constantly in combat with critics; some, such as Ivor Brown and James Agate, were counted among his friends. That Priestley engaged so actively and at times formidably with the critics was unusual for a playwright of his generation: Here, They Came to a City, which ran for eight months, is a good case in point.
Produced during the Second World War, and questioning the relationship of class and community to modes of living, it presented a discussion of utopian social visions for a wartime audience hungry for some recognition of the hardship of their recent experiences. Thus, from the mid to late s his processing of theories of time are played out in Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before but these reverberate in plays from the s as well.
By contrast he saw most critics as operating in favour of a theatre system which inhibited playwrights from developing their work, because it relied on the marketing of products: It could be argued that such divisions are effectively irrelevant as Priestley returned to themes at different points in his playwriting career, and equally, aspects of socialist thinking have a sustained centrality in his work. One might see his playwriting as developing in line with his growing involvement in the processes of making theatre: The staging of plays from the early s is far less complex than those from the late s and early s such as Johnson Over Jordan see Chapter 8 and They Came to a City for example see Chapter 5.
He is not atypical in this: With two world wars only some twenty-one years apart, two out of three generations of women had differentiated expectations in terms of their place in the employment market. Such transformations were bound to change the structure and operation of the family as a working unit, and this was something of which Priestley was aware.
As for the free-and-easy banter of the mannish women, their pontifical airs, their pedantry, their shrill sarcasms, they are simply ineffectual, a mere play of shadows, compared with this older method of feminine attack and defence, the method of polite smiling irony. In other words, if women behave in a way which is culturally recognised as masculine, then such masculine behaviour is being ratified rather than questioned.
Priestley strongly believed that the feminine and the masculine were oppositions, the dynamics and manifestations of which could be easily formulated. Indeed women feature as the heroines or the narrative drivers of many of his plays. Moreover, it is important to remember that his division of the sexes, unlike many others who critiqued the emancipation of women, was not based on the idea that either the feminine or the masculine was superior to the other.
Similarly, his understanding of gender and the way in which it operates is also integral to his dramatic representations of the family, where often women are both central and represent two extremes of the ideological spectrum. Priestley was fascinated by women on a personal level, and his own experiences of family life were complex. Interestingly however, his dramatic depictions of the traditional family unit are often of a social structure in collapse, the foundations disturbed by social and political events, the cosy traditions remodelled through necessity.
Thus, while his most successful play on Broadway during this period, the London production ran for just performances at the Lyric in London in Since this point, however, it has become, with the obvious exception of An Inspector Calls, one of his most popular plays; similar to An Inspector Calls, its immediate popularity was outside of England see Chapter 7. Mr Priestley has looked upon the theatrical drawing-room and has been, with good reason, a little bored by it.
The play sees Priestley manipulating the detective format and using a time device to confuse the audience see Chapter 4. The plot is seemingly uncomplex. The Caplan family women and their guest, Miss Mockridge — a popular novelist whose novels are published by the Caplan family publishing house — are listening to the radio in the drawing room. Olwen then tries to cover her tracks and end the discussion, but Robert pushes her and the focus then moves to an awkward and heated discussion about Martin and the events leading up to his death.
The family, gender and sexual relations 67 As the play progresses through its three acts, we discover that each of the family members have had significant dealings with Martin of which the others are unaware. Thus, the family outsiders Olwen, Stanton and Miss Mockridge, each in their own way, contribute to an uncomfortable unpicking of the threads which have held the family together.
This all sounds somewhat farcical and is a deliberate play on a romantic comedy format, yet all of the relationships or romantic longings are deeply problematic and ultimately unhappy ones. He saw himself as some sort of Pan. He thought of me. I was sorry for him, because really he was ill, sick in mind and body, and I thought perhaps I could calm him down. He was one of our own set, mixed up with most of the people I liked best in the world. We started life too early for that, possibly now they are breeding people who can live without illusions.
I suppose we ought to get all that from faith in life. No religion or anything. When the lights come up the scene is the same as at the beginning of the play and The family, gender and sexual relations 69 the women are listening to the radio: In twisting the end of the play so that we return in a loop to the beginning, Priestley recreates the closed circularity which the family have broken through during the play, as we have witnessed it.
Were we just seeing the working out of a plot as conceived in the mind of the novelist Miss Mockridge? Such possibilities are unlikely, but Priestley clearly dislocates our trust in the realism of that which we have just observed. And this is of course a deliberate strategy on his part, we are invited to believe in the integrity of the middle-class family unit and then witness the unpicking of all the threads which have held it together.
Martin Caplan, who never appears and whose character is entirely constructed through the descriptions of those around him, is the central force in the play; he is the family member who has lived outside the traditional mores which the family has established. It is surprising that his bisexuality and drug addiction are so overt, given the censorship laws which prevailed over theatres and playwrights at the time see Nicholson Rather than presenting homosexuality in the negative, Martin is bisexual, his sexuality is not contained by gendered preference and functions outside of either heterosexuality or homosexuality: Far removed from the s in which it was written, Priestley turns back the clock as a means of looking at issues around heritage, religion and exclusion using The family, gender and sexual relations 71 the family unit and the disintegration of the foundations which serve as its basis as a central focal point for dramatic action.
The young people in the play, both those from the inner circle of the McBane family and those who represent the excluded outsiders — Jean, Douglas and Angus, the children of the outlawed Charlie McBane — have a contemporary demeanour. They come across as the new generation of the s not of the Edwardian era. The McBanes are an extended family: David McBane, a preacher and businessman, is the family patriarch.
His wife has died and he and his daughter Elspie share a home with Mildred McBane. Along with his brother Malcolm and sister-in-law, Mildred, David heads the family business established at the latter end of the nineteenth century. His religious fervour is Presbyterian in nature and his nephew Harvey, much to his joy, is also training to be a preacher. The family are awaiting the arrival of the three children of his dead and once wayward brother Charlie. Their presence has been requested in order that they may sign off on some papers relating to the ownership of the family business.
At the same time as presenting the three in terms of their relationship to the family, David is also clear that they are outsiders and do not share the beliefs or privileges of his own immediate family. Their father was an alcoholic who had more in common with the loggers and working men who were his own employees. Yet as Dr Gratton, an old friend of the family reminds them, in terms of heritage Charlie actually provided the most children for the family line. She simply does not want them inside the family home. When asked what she thinks about Jean and her brothers, having just met them, she responds: What I felt — and it upset me, gave me the queerest shaky sort of feeling — was that they were so strange.
All three have the same sort of eyes — they just look at you. This is ironic in terms of what he has brought them into the family to achieve. It turns out that their father was knowingly cheated out of his share of the family business by Mildred and Malcolm, who made sure that when Charlie signed away his share in the family business, he was too inebriated to know what he was doing. The discovery that he and his family have built their community and business profile through dishonesty shocks David and, as the play draws to a close, his position as patriarch and giver of unchallengeable orders has been undermined.
The family, gender and sexual relations 73 Priestley deliberately constructs the outsiders as infiltrators and, just as with Dangerous Corner, it is the outsiders who force the family to re-evaluate its perception of itself as a solid and unbreakable social unit. That Jean, Douglas and Angus have made a pact to avenge their father in The Glass Cage is resolved through their decision at the end of the play not to take money from the McBanes and not to demand any reparation for the wrongs which were meted out to their father and by association, their mother and themselves.
Jean locates herself and her brothers in terms of the world in which they were raised: And of course that seemed as wicked and terrible to us as it did to her.
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Each side of the family has humanised the other — David now realises that the basis on which he was operating was false and Jean and her brothers feel that their side of the family history has been exposed and accounted for. The coloniser and the representation of the colonised are somehow reconciled knowing that their worlds have changed. Rather than being a liberal or religious conclusion it is one in which Priestley suggests that we can be released from the control of the ghost of our pasts, that there is always an alternative way forward for both the group and the individual, although racism, however implied, prevails.
It is certainly the case that in a number of the earlier plays the dramatic action is dependent on forthright and assertive female characters. These are often written as pairs, each of which represents one extreme of an ideological spectrum. They often also have a prodigal quality whereby their return into the family fold creates an opportunity for reassessment of the family unit. You were right Stella, to cut and run when you did. Just as he imagines that Stella has had a glowing career, so she has convinced herself that by returning home everything would be as it once was. Lilian, who once had dreams of participating in traditionally masculine adventures, tells her brother, on leave from his job in Africa, But I used to be much more adventurous than you and much keener on exploring and wild places.
When Stella accuses her of being small-minded and unaware of the real misery in the wider world, Lilian simply accuses her of being self-indulgent and of wallowing in emotion and sentiment.
For Lilian, Stella feeds on her ability to make others emotionally 76 Key plays dependent on her: The women, in contrast, pose philosophical questions around issues of choice, loss and duty. But he also feels that by returning to as a setting, the play loses impact over time: This reading, however, removes the possibility of more sophisticated analysis. But Eden End is more than a play about the Edwardian middle classes, just as it is a play which has resonated with audiences beyond those of the s.
In using the family as a focal point for examining the relationship of the individual to the group and the group to the community at large, Priestley asserts, through the return of the prodigal daughter, the fragility of those social structures which we rely on being robust. On the death of the Conway patriarch during the late s, Mrs Conway, the family matriarch, took over the running of the family affairs.
It is the prodigal daughters who take her to task about her poor financial management, and specifically Madge, a teacher and spinster for whom Mrs Conway has little affection or respect. Madge accuses her mother of neglect both of the family unit and of the individuals within it. When I was at home — and knew about things — we were considered quite well off. There were all the shares and property father left, not simply for mother but for all of us.
And now not only has it been frittered away, but we are expected to provide for mother. What is interesting here is that Jean and Marion represent two extremes of the ideological spectrum. Jean, on the other hand, is a doctor who, although an avowed socialist, despises the complacency of the working classes as well as wanting to make the world a fairer place in which they have more social and economic opportunity. And I hate all the idiotic feminine fusses and tantrums.
While other plays examined in this chapter have focused on the changing dynamics of the feminine in relation to the family, Priestley simultaneously examines masculinity in a state of flux and patriarchy as no longer central to the family unit. His wife, however supportive on a domestic and emotional level, knows that he is unlikely to want to retire, and so manipulates a situation where the question of his retirement is brought to the top of the family agenda. Here Priestley leaves the patriarch to battle with his own conscience in a state of remove from the family over which he has hitherto resided.
In the moments between death and some kind of afterlife, Johnson takes a journey through his past and is given the opportunity to re-examine the feelings and events which have shaped his life. Moving between the distant and the recent past, Johnson comes to terms with how he has functioned as a husband and lover and as a father.
In both Dangerous Corner and Time and the Conways, the patriarch is very deliberately removed but the family is still somehow shaped by him in his absence. It might be suggested that Priestley is offering some homage to the patriarch in these plays, but in fact what he is doing is far more complex. In The Glass Cage, where no matriarch is present, it is the next generation with whom David McBane has to fight in order to sustain his position as patriarch.
As the family secrets are exposed, so his children are exposed to the wider world outside of the tightly knit family, and in turn the community, from the centre of which he rules. An actor with a solid but quiet authority, Gwenn was perfectly suited to Radfern, the assured homely patriarch of an ordinary respectable suburban London family. When Radfern, The family, gender and sexual relations 83 jokingly we believe, suggests that rather than working as an honest manager and businessman, he has, for some years, been laundering money with his old friend, Joe Fletten, the family are shocked.
Comedy, marriage and sexual relations: Even relatively contemporary critics have found it difficult to place his comic writing alongside the more overtly politically driven works for the stage see Innes From a perspective of overview, it would be unwise to assess the impact of his oeuvre without paying attention to the comedies, and especially his comedies of marriage. Late in life Priestley wrote very freely of his attitude to sex: I have been lusty and given to lechery and have never hidden my inclinations from my waking self.
In other words, nothing has ever been suppressed in this department. Never a sexy inclination has been hurried out of consciousness. This does not mean that my waking life has been one long orgy — far from it — but at least it does mean that I have never been busy stoking the unconscious with a heated sexuality forbidden to consciousness. I have come to terms with Eros while awake, so that, not neglected and furious, she has not had to burst into my dreams.
And what do you get for it all? Kettle and Mrs Moon, having negotiated what each can expect from the other as a partner, ultimately leave the tedium of their lives as bank manager and wife-to-pompous-businessman and set off with Monica in tow, for the unknown and a life of relatively unconventional freedom. Much comedy ensues as the balance of power within each relationship is transformed: Eventually the couples are released from their turmoil and told they were in fact married after all, but we are left with a sense that their relationships will never be the same again.
A similar appraisal of romantic relationships is allowed through the framework of a wartime setting in How Are They At Home?
An Inspector Calls - Wikipedia
Working as a land girl she is practical and views relationships in terms of their functionality: These are the same non- The family, gender and sexual relations 87 traditional women who Priestley problematises in the early essay noted at the beginning of this chapter — but here they are celebrated. Courtesy of the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection.
Helen and William step in and out of the story — changing characters and playing different roles — and through doing so come to understand what may or may not have gone wrong in their own failed marriage. Priestley presents three couples as intellectual equals able to assess the dynamics of their marriages and identify the obstacles, either personal or cultural, which have lain in their paths.
Dealing with what would have then been thought of as the primary familial relationship, that of husband and wife, Priestley echoes his early drama, Dangerous Corner, in using the theatrical possibilities of playing with time — reversing it, stepping in and outside of the past through storytelling and removing the realist framework. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation.
Others had similarly begun to 90 Key plays investigate the relationship between time and motion as a means of assessing working processes and increasing industrial productivity: Taylor based on time and motion studies in the workplace, became the basic tenet of mass production within industry, in which the production of goods was unimaginably increased by the introduction of the conveyor belt and the assembly line see for example Taylor Priestley and the culture of time Priestley has a certain reputation which derives from his interest in time as a fourth dimension: Clive Barker suggests that Priestley was not alone in his dramatic experiments with time during the mid-twentieth century Barker Priestley was alone in his continuing obsession, on a variety of levels, with aspects of time in his playwriting.
For David Harvey Even under conditions of widespread class revolt, the dialectic of Being and Becoming has posed intractable problems. Above all, the changing meaning of space and time which capitalism has itself wrought, has forced perpetual re-evaluations in representations of the world in cultural life.
Dunne and in turn, P. We invent Time to explain change and succession. We try to account for it out there in the world we are observing, but soon run into trouble because it is not out there at all. It comes with the travelling searchlight, the moving slit. In a theatrical context this allowed him to shift the relationship between what we see and what we understand ourselves to have seen in plays like Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls.
The time was out of joint Priestley a: Time is replayed and reconstructed as events from the past — the veracity of which are constantly in question — dominate the narrative. As Act III of the play ends, so time is accelerated and we are sent back to the beginning of the play: The classic detective story twist here is that the murder never happened. The hypocrisy and foul play has been exposed and explained and the idyll of middle-class comfort at the end of the play undermined, thus there is not the formal sense of closure traditionally promised by the well-made, three-act play.
Here, through his investigation into the death of Eva Smith, Inspector Goole forces the Birling family to scrutinise and account for their past actions, through reconstructing and altering their perceived relationship to the supposedly dead Eva. When in Act III the Birlings discover that Inspector Goole does not work for the police or any official agency and that in fact no one knows where he has come from, the implications of his investigations lose their immediacy for the family.
However, the plot twists right at the end of the play when the family receive a phone call to tell them that an inspector is on his way to the house, to question them about a girl who has died from swallowing disinfectant. This is of course completely undermined, as is our perception of the story, by the ending of the play. We are effectively, though not technically as with Dangerous Corner, being sent back to the beginning of the play.
Dunne over which I had been brooding over the past two years. Priestley, quoted in DeVitis and Kalson At the beginning of Act II it appears that nothing has changed, Kay is in the same position at the window in semi-darkness, but then the lights come up and we see that the room has changed significantly and that we have moved forward to the present day She is deeply disturbed. It merely moves us on — in this life — from one peep-hole to the next.
But the happy young Conways. Time and the time plays 97 ALAN: What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us — the real you, the real me. Yes, and in for a tremendous adventure. Kay observes the future of her family from a dream-like state in the present and is perhaps given the opportunity to intervene in order to change the envisioned future.
DeVitis and Kalson note that what Dunne contributes to the fabric of the work is a note of hope, an intimation of immortality. DeVitis and Kalson With each of the Time plays, both in London and New York, many dramatic critics, with an air of vast intellectual superiority, produced observations that were childish. It is not — and was never intended to be — a play about reincarnation. Reincarnation says that we make many appearances, as many different personalities, in many different ages. Recurrence, as interpreted by Ouspensky, says we lead our own lives, with some differences over and over again.
Actually I think that Time and the time plays 99 reincarnation is perhaps a more attractive and more plausible theory than this of recurrence, but, I repeat, it has nothing to do with my play. Meanwhile, his wife Janet and Farrant spend the day out walking and somehow become besotted with each other.
It is only the name we give to higher dimensions of things. In our present state of consciousness, we cannot experience these dimensions spatially, but only successively. That we call time. But there are more times than one. You bright young men, with your outlines of everything, are going to be horribly surprised yet.
In Ever Since Paradise and Music at Night he suspends, expands and reverses the direction of real time in parallel with the playing out of remarkably simple plot lines: The expansion of time: Unlike When We Are Married see Chapter 3 , Priestley did not approach his subject here with an eye to formal comedy, although what he calls a Discursive Entertainment has many comic elements within it.
The plot moves around the discussion by three couples, of the histories, and possible alternative histories, of their relationships. The dramatic frame is initially constructed around two of the couples, one of which provides musical accompaniment for the others, who act as narrators. Similarly Philip and Joyce, the accompanists, learn more about their relationship through Time and the time plays witnessing and participating in the story of Paul and Rosemary. Time is stopped, repeated, replayed and projected forward.
The Narrators, the episodic action, the shift from prose to verse, the endings of scenes revealed as they begin, the emphasis on how a relationship breaks down rather than what happens to the couple, the accent on the theater as theater all suggest devices of epic theater. Such experimental impetus was also key to Johnson Over Jordan see Chapter 8 in which Priestley also attempted to remove normative structures of time from the play. What I wanted them [Johnson Over Jordan and Music at Night] to suggest was life outside Time as we usually know it, the kind of freedom of the fourth dimension that comes to us in a fragmentary fashion in dreams, events out of chronological order, childhood and adult life interrupting each other, all of which can bring a piercing sweetness, a queer poignancy, and, again, dramatic experience a little different from what one has known before.
What is interesting about the play in terms of representations of time is that at key moments time past, present and future converge as Robert Smith makes his journey through his past at the same time as the chronology of time is deliberately blurred. The overarching framework — his funeral and the days which follow it — gives an added dimension to Johnson as the onlooker upon his own life: Within the acceptable confines of a musical gathering in the household of an upper-class hostess, the mixture of people present is as representative of the British class system as it could be.
Those such as the society reporter Phillip Chilham and the industrialist James Dirnie are literally haunted by ghosts from their workingclass pasts. As the three acts, structured around three movements of the new concerto, progress, we play witness to the remembrances of the characters — the ghosts who visit do so in the actual present of the play and so the past is played out in the present as characters move in and out of their dream-like thought processes.
Theatrically what we see involves very little physical movement — some characters move forward to speak, some speak from a static position as part of the on stage audience for the concerto. The characters move outside themselves to represent people from the dreams of others on stage, or the voices of nameless groups of people.
The whole effect should suggest humanity itself outside time. At the same time the dead should be grouped at one side, in such a way as to suggest there are countless numbers of them, that we are only seeing the beginning of a vast crowd. In typical Priestley fashion we are brought back to the musical parlour right at the end of the play, to discover that Bendrex has died during the concerto and is taken away by the ghost of his manservant, Mr Parks.
They Came to a City: I am on the side of the workers, the masses that most insulting term , the proletariat, but I do not believe that there resides in them some mystical virtue that will somehow become the leaven of a new and greater culture; just as I do not believe that the art of literature has taken an immense step forward because a few not very good novels about communal cement works have been published. This has happened before, when a class has newly come into power, and it is now time for it to happen again, but on a much bigger scale.
Williams groups these as the paradise, the externally altered world, the willed transformation and the technological transformation Williams The meaning of professional life: Here Gridley and Patch are in charge of looking after the no-longer seaworthy S. Gridley and Patch undermine the plan but not because they are anti-capitalist per se, they simply want to work in a world in which they know where they stand and, on a professional level, one in which their hard work is recognised and rewarded.
I want to see some men about, real men who know what sense is and duty is and order is. Lord Cottingley, the capitalist, Gaster, the communist, and Captain Mellock, the fascist. Audiences, despite the presence of rising stage stars Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier in the cast, were equally unimpressed by the play, which ran for fewer than fifty performances. Clearly the world in which Gridley and Patch function is dystopian, but Priestley gives them the potential to effect change through action. Lidley represents the drive for non-individualised learning, turning universities into educational factories, whereas for Linden education should be moulded to individual need.
Thus Linden, whose workplace is less and less like the mirror of Oxford University which he would have liked it to become Priestley Just as Williams points to the interconnectedness of utopian and dystopian structures, so too Linden makes the decision to battle inside a negative environment for a more positive one.
This struck a chord with post Second World War audiences of the original production, which ran for over performances, with a cast including theatrical icons Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson. Miss Porrin and Mr Biddle, the two long-term and loyal employees, are pitched against Lawrence, young, ambitious and looking for more rewarding work elsewhere. With its poetic ending, Cornelius shows glimpses of the imagery in the later Johnson Over Jordan Nevertheless, he chooses not to be just a cog in the machine of commercial business. Cornelius chooses an individualist path, whereas for Professor Linden in The Linden Tree, the community still has potential.
Urban visions of utopia: They Came to a City Priestley conceived the idea for They Came to a City from the early days of the war, but it was not written until It is certainly the case that when the characters describe what they have found in the city outside which they mysterious arrive in Act I, very little real detail is given. What comes across is the atmosphere, the attitudes of the people in the city, and brief glimpses of their reported activities. The set is architectonic and lacks any curvature — it is stark and imposing.
During Act I the characters, all representing a range of classes — a few from the ruling class, a banker from Leamington Spa, a merchant seaman, a cleaner and so on — do not know where they are or how they have arrived there. The ruling classes and financiers — Lady Loxfield, Sir George and Cudworth — and the petit bourgeois characters such as Mrs Stritton — do not like what they have found in the city.
For them the dancing in the city gardens, the lack of interest in wealth, the equality between the city dwellers, has little appeal. Of the nine characters who filter on to the stage in Act I, those who do not like the city find the comparative classlessness within its walls hard to Key plays comprehend or admire.
Conversely, for Joe Dinmore, the disillusioned ex-seaman, the city offers a level of equality which he had only hitherto imagined: And nobody can ever darken it for them again. Rural visions of utopian futures: