TIME AND THE CONWAYS To 16 August.
London.
TIME AND THE CONWAYS
by J B Priestley.
Lyttelton Thatre In rep to 16 August 2009.
Mon-Sun 7.30pm Mat various days 2.15pm.
Runs 3hr Two intervals.
Audio-described 24 July 24 7.30pm 25 July 2.15pm.
Captioned 27 July.
Runs 3hr Two intervals.
TICKETS 020 7452 3000.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/tickets
Review: Carole Woddis 6 May.
Excellent revival of an intriguing play.
Sometimes overlooked but never under-rated, J B Priestley was a man of his time. And, like his contemporary, T S Eliot, he was very concerned with the nature of Time, its properties and philosophical implications.
In recent years, he has often been seen as conventional, a traditionalist. It’s true Time and the Conways (1937) seems to follow the old three-act form. With two intervals, Rupert Goold’s revival runs three hours – a substantial evening. It’s style is also fairly conventional – a family drama in which a well-heeled upper middle-class family, busily dressing up for a 21st birthday party, enjoy themselves and inter alia, make fun of the lower classes. You wait, hopefully, for their comeuppance, as in the later An Inspector Calls. But it never comes. At least not in the way you expect.
Instead, Priestley shows himself to be a time traveller flirting with premonition in the same way as T S Eliot experimented with Time in The Family Reunion. And before them, J M Barrie in Mary Rose.
But fast-forwarding and then returning back again, Priestley here seems to be experimenting on several fronts: to create mood, to show Time as destroyer and even to shake up our perceptions. Because there’s no doubt in Rupert Goolds’ busy, sometimes highly visual production, the jolt back to 1919 after a fastforwarding to 1938 makes us see the personalities of the Conway family – mother, four daughters, two sons – in an entirely different light. Priestley implies the question: which is their `real’ self? We see `slices’ of them, first as optimistic, youthful, then nineteen years later, embittered, thwarted by experience, disappointed.
Both social critique and melancholy reflection on the lost hopes and optimism generated by the ending of the Great War, Time and the Conways, written in the shadow of the war to come still contains a modicum of hope, even if it is expressed through the mouth of the play’s most modest, retiring figure, Alan. But as played by Paul Ready, this inconsequential town clerk expresses the wisdom of the wise fool. Or was this how Priestley, in part, saw himself? Intriguing.
Mrs Conway: Francesca Annis.
Alan: Paul Ready.
Madge: Fenella Woolgar.
Robin: Mark Dexter.
Hazel: Lydia Leonard.
Kay: Hattie Morahan.
Carol: Faye Castelow.
Joan Helford: Lisa Jackson.
Gerald Thornton: Alistair Petrie.
Ernest Beevers: Adrian Scarborough.
Ensemble: Lorna Beckett, Jessie Burton, Lucy Cudden, Lynette Edwards, Simon Markey, Perri Snowdon.
Director: Rupert Goold.
Designer: Laura Hopkins.
Lighting: Mark Henderson.
Sound/Music: Adam Cork.
Video: Fifty Nine Productions Ltd.
Movement: Scott Ambler.
Voice work: Jeannette Nelson.
2009-05-09 13:10:34