Having achieved success with fiction in the early 1930s, J B Priestley turned his attention to the theatre. He wrote several plays that became known collectively as the “time plays” because they made use of ideas and theories about the nature of time. He was very influenced by his reading of the book An Experiment with Time by J W Dunne, published in 1927.
Perhaps the most effective of these plays and the one that leans most heavily on the work of Dunne is Time and the Conways, first staged in 1939. I recently listened to a BBC radio version of this play. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I shall try to explain just why it impressed me so much.
A while ago, I attempted to write a novel, based on my own experience when I was considerably younger. As I wrote, with a mixture of memory and imagination, the presence of the past became so strong that I began to feel it must all still be going on somewhere, somehow. That is exactly the feeling that I had when listening to this play.
The play opens in 1919 when the first world war is over and the wealthy Conway family have a bright future to look forward to. Robin, the favourite son, has returned from the RAF. We hear about their hopes and plans for the future. They are all in high spirits during the evening party. Yet Kay, the daughter whose twenty-first birthday is being celebrated, falls into an oddly melancholy state of mind, a sort of absence, oblivious to the laughter around her. Mrs Conway says that the late Mr Conway used to do the same thing.
The second act jumps forward to 1937. Things have not turned out as hoped. The money has gone, one of the daughters has died and Robin’s ambitions have come to nothing. It’s the less ambitious son, Alan, who seems to be the least unhappy, not embittered or frustrated like some of the others. He says it is to do with time and he tries to explain this to Kay, quoting a poem by William Blake. If we could understand time properly, realise that it is not linear, we would see life differently. It’s all in a book he says. This is presumably a reference to J W Dunne.
Then the third act returns to the party in 1919, minutes after we left it, but we see it all differently now. It’s heavy with dramatic irony because we know what awaits the characters in the future but they do not. We are seeing the origins of what will go wrong later. A relationship starts that really should not have done; another one is tragically thwarted before it has got going. Mrs Conway is given financial advice that turns out to be wrong.
It’s the rather complacent Mrs Conway who predicts a rosy future for everyone. She patronises the only working-class person at the party, someone who will turn out to have rather more impact on the family fortunes than she realises. Kay seems to be aware of the conversation about time that she will have with Alan in the future. It’s a spine-tingling moment when she asks Alan about the Blake poem. In her dreamlike state, she was given a glimpse of the future, as we the audience were.
The play combines several themes. There is the family tragedy, the social comment about England in the inter-war period, and the speculation about the nature of time. What makes it so wonderfully effective is that these elements are all combined harmoniously. It’s the slight hint of the supernatural that makes it more than a conventional realistic drama.
Film director Jean-Luc Godard famously said that “a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”. He was speaking twenty years after Priestley’s play when manipulating the time sequence of a story had become commonplace. I suspect that Priestley might have been one of the first to do this sort of thing, at least in drama, perhaps influencing Noel Coward’s films In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter.
My late father used to talk about the great impact that the time plays had made on him. I wish I could go back and tell him how much I enjoyed Time and the Conways. If Dunne is right, he probably knew anyway, and could see that one day I would be sitting here writing this.
I feel the final words must belong to William Blake, as quoted by Alan in the play:
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine,
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so,
We were made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
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For the love of reading. My thoughts on fiction and poetry, mainly, but not exclusively, from the earlier part of the twentieth century. With some films and audiobooks as the mood takes me.
The Good Reader 