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

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So what are the ambitions they harbour? Kay says of Alan (p. 19) that he "has no ambition at all" and he agrees: "Not much", though Kay rightly suspects that he is deeper than he lets on: "I believe he has tremendous long adventures inside his head that nobody knows anything about". Madge has political and academic aspirations: she wants to inspire social change while pursuing a career as a scholar at the highest level. Robin has "all sorts of plans" (p. 30) though they are not so much plans as whimsical ideas; his practical planning has not gone beyond buying some smart clothes (in this he can be contrasted with Ernest, who is not yet wealthy, but spends little on his dress, while putting his money into buying a share in a paper-mill; p. 64). Hazel's aspirations are social; she is a noted local beauty and hopes to make an advantageous marriage (she explains this more fully in Act Three, but in Act One we see that for the moment she and Joan are simply looking for a good time). It is Kay whose ambition seems most difficult of fulfilment, as she wishes to be a famous novelist, but she has already done something about it, writing The Garden of Stars Judging from Hazel's quotation, this novel is literate if full of romantic clichés; it is not serious enough for Kay, who has torn up the manuscript. Carol's ambitions are not made clear in this act, but she seems, like Alan, very contented with life already.

In 1919, Hazel’s first reaction to Ernest Beevers - based purely on his name, before they meet - is to joke that "I’m sorry for his wife if he has one". In 1937, she’s unhappily married to him and very scared of her husband. The play emerged from Priestley’s reading of J. W. Dunne’s book An Experiment with Timein which Dunne posits that all time is happening simultaneously; i.e., that past, present, future are one and that linear time is only the way in which human consciousness is able to perceive this. [3]

Micaela Diamond and Nathan Salstone Sing

When Mrs. Conway appears she is full of criticism: for Joan and Hazel, because they are weak, and for Madge because she is an old maid. Though Kay has not married, she has had affairs and is still attractive, and Mrs. Conway now favours her. She is contemptuous of her bachelor son, Alan. 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. An Inspector Calls (USSR 1945, UK 1946), the most famous of them, where a family undergoes a police investigation into a suicide in which they are revealed to be progressively more entangled. Hazel is said to be the same age as Joan. Numbers in bold are Priestley's indications of age in the dialogue or stage-directions.

Time and the Conways is the second of J.B. Priestley’s Time Plays—six plays (the first being Dangerous Corner) dealing with different theories of time, and how time is experienced. This play focuses on the Conways, a wealthy family living in a prosperous suburb of the fictitious manufacturing town Newlingham, and their declining fortunes between 1919 and 1937. The first act takes place during Kay Conway’s twenty-first birthday in 1919. Aside from Mrs. Conway, the Conways are all in their early twenties or younger, and have their whole lives ahead of them. The boys of the family have just returned from war. Mrs. Conway, the widowed mother of all of them, owns lots of valuable real estate in Newlingham. The future appears bright. The explanation Madge refused to hear is now given to Kay: Alan quotes some lines from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence, and explains his theory of time: it is not, as Kay has feared, "a great devil" but "only a kind of dream" and people are not its victims but "immortal beings" and "in for a tremendous adventure". At the other end of the scale is her future brother-in-law Gerald, a heartless Northern capitalist and another character borrowed from Chekhov, whose awfulness is a tribute to actor Adrian Scarborough. For a final flourish, once you've done enough nicing, you might want to close with this characteristically recherché quibble from Nightingale. "Why," he asks, "must Francesca Annis, playing the Conway matriarch, suddenly transform herself from a blithely overbearing, sublimely tactless Ranevskaya into a rasping Medea?" But you're going to have to Google those yourself.Hazel Conway, the most beautiful and popular of the Conway sisters. Fair-haired, elegant, and seemingly self-confident, she is at her best at parties and games. She is pursued by and finally married to Ernest Beevers, a social-climbing young man who represents everything that the Conways scorn. She becomes a weak and terrorized wife. Priestley uses the idea to show how human beings experience loss, failure and the death of their dreams but also how, if they could experience reality in its transcendent nature, they might find a way out. The idea is not dissimilar to that presented by mysticism and religion that if human beings could understand the transcendent nature of their existence the need for greed and conflict would come to an end. When Priestley left the army he studied at Cambridge University, where he completed a degree in Modern History and Political Science. Subsequently he found work as theatre reviewer with the Daily News, and also contributed to the Spectator, the Challenge and Nineteenth Century. His earliest books included The English Comic Characters (1925), The English Novel (1927), and English Humour (1928). His breakthrough came with the immensely popular novel The Good Companions, published in 1929, and Angel Pavement followed in 1930. He emerged, too, as a successful dramatist with such plays as Dangerous Corner (1932), Time and the Conways (1937), When We Are Married (1938) and An Inspector Calls (1947). Casting: Jim Carnahan, CSAand Jillian Cimini, C.S.A.; Press Representative: Polk & Co.; Fight direction by Thomas Schall; Roundabout Director of Marketing: Elizabeth Kandel; Roundabout Director of Development: Christopher Nave, CFRE; Roundabout Founding Director: Gene Feist; Associate Artistic Dir: Scott Ellis; Advertising: SPOTCo, Inc.; Interactive Marketing: Situation Interactive; Dialect Coach: Deborah Hecht; Photographer: Joan Marcus References

Comment on how well, in your view, these parents bring up their children. Who would you rather have as your father or mother? Note the significant difference, that Mr. Gradgrind sees his mistake and changes, very much for the better, while we have no reason to suppose that Mrs. Conway ever does this. There's little sign of conservatism in Second Coming/Winter, Again, the new double bill from Dundee Rep's resident sister company, Scottish Dance Theatre. It is difficult to imagine a more distinct contrast between two modern dance pieces than exists here between the works of Los Angeles choreographer Victor Quijada and his Norwegian counterpart Jo Strømgren. His prolific output continued right up to his final years, and to the end he remained the great literary all-rounder. His favourite among his books was for many years the novel Bright Day, though he later said he had come to prefer The Image Men. I Have Been Here Before, which is inspired by P. D. Ouspensky's theory of eternal recurrence from A New Model of the Universe; [3]Robin arrives, once more half-way into the act; he has no shame at his many failings, and is still sponging off others. Ernest makes it clear that he will not help the family out (he has the money and, as he points out, he is not tight-fisted, but he is taking his revenge for being patronised in the past); Robin cannot resist scoring a point, and hints to Beevers that he has had some of Ernest's money - from Hazel. Robin threatens Ernest who is not at all intimidated, but it is Mrs. Conway who actually strikes him. Ernest leaves, with Hazel following, and there is no doubt that she is to suffer for Robin's boast and her mother's hot-headed conduct. There are some palpable ironic hits: a groaning laugh went up at the proclamation that there would be "no more boom and bust" in the economy. There's also a strong vein of feminism: this woman-filled play shows female expectations being systematically shrunk. "If I were a man," exclaims one of the sisters, "I'd want to be very important."

It is in Act Three that the seeds are sown of the characters' future unhappiness: and it is because we already know (having seen Act Two) how different their future is to be from what they expect, that this Act is so painful to witness. Priestley's skill as a playwright also appears in the way in which he has shown us in the previous act what to look out for here. The most poignant example is the youngest Carol, played to perfection by Faye Castelow, who is doomed to prove that only the good die young. The young actress has effortlessly stepped up from notable performances in the Havel Season at the Orange Tree and should be set for a sparkling career. The other part of Dunne’s theory—that even though we experience time “from one peephole to the next” as Alan puts it, time itself is a “whole landscape” (177) without vector—overlaps with the treatment of time in Top Girls and in Strange Interlude. Time and the Conways doesn’t mix up different moments in time as much as Top Girls does, but by splicing the scene in the present into the middle of the scene in 1919, Priestley is encouraging the audience to look at the events in this play as a landscape rather than a fixed sequence of events (as he presented time in Dangerous Corner.) The audience can see both the ruptures in this landscape, and the smooth, natural flows connecting different moments. Watching Act III, we can see how the over-confidence of the Conways, and Mrs. Conway’s unwillingness to sell any holdings until the economy improves in the post-war boom (which never came for Britain) flows into their demise in Act II. We also see the painful, ugly disjuncture of time with Carol, the youngest Conway who we know to be long dead in Act II, gushing about all her ambitions and desires, all the things she wants to accomplish with her life.

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They are separated by the whole of the inter-war period and a remarkable development in the lives of six grown children and their mother, mirroring the fortunes of their type, as the class system collapsed. Time and the Conways is not as good a play but nevertheless fascinates in a production that the prolific Rupert Goold plays straight. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( October 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)