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

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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. 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. What is your opinion of the way the two texts present the idea of seeing or failing to see what the future will bring? Note that both authors tell the reader/audience things the characters have yet to discover.

The choices Kay makes, which lead to her discontentedness in Act Two, occur later: we learn of them only from her comments in this act. She differs from most of the others, in that she has a chance of changing things, as Alan explains. Carol has promised (p. 81) that she will never leave Kay, but will look after her wherever she goes. At the end of the play we have a sense of how, in the future Carol will keep her word, as Kay is guided to Alan for help: he will show her that Time is not a "great devil" and it isn't "beating us" (p. 60). We have seen characters (p. 61) "snatch and grab and hurt each other" but Alan urges Kay to "take a long view", as if we are "immortal beings" and "in for a great adventure" (a word Kay earlier used of Alan's secret thoughts (p. 19). The second act keeps the same room as its setting, but jumps forward to 1937 (which was the present day when the play was first performed) and Kay’s 40th birthday. The mood is bleak, a new war is approaching and this future has not been kind to the Conways. The Garden of Stars. Carol reappears with Beevers (to whom she is friendly) and Gerald. The cast is completed by the arrival of Robin. He is wearing his RAF officer's uniform, and is full of plans for making his fortune; he is evidently attracted to Joan. Do say: Remember Daldry's Inspector Calls? I remember Daldry's Inspector Calls. It was in 1992, you know. 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 ]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. Robin Conway, the younger son, his mother’s favorite and a loafer with no apparent talent. Robin is returning from World War I as the play begins. He is charming and good-looking and spends much of his time pursuing Joan Helford, to whom he is married and whom he subsequently abandons. He manipulates his mother, who gives him money, but he proves unable to help her when she faces financial difficulties. Madge Conway, the eldest sister. She is a well-educated and efficient woman, busy with plans for social and political reform. She is the least attractive of the sisters but has a romantic interest in Gerald Thornton early in the play, an interest that might be returned. A possible union with Thornton is thwarted by her mother, who treats her ideas with scorn. Madge ultimately becomes the hostile, defensive headmistress of a girls’ school. 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.

But, unwittingly, Goold also exposes a weakness in Priestley's play: that its mysticism often seems like an extra ingredient rather than something that grows organically from the text. The play premiered at the Duchess Theatre in the West End in August 1937. [4] The cast comprised Alexander Archdale, Wilfred Babbage, Eileen Erskine, Barbara Everest, Jean Forbes-Robertson, Helen Horsey, Marie Johns, J. P. Mitchelhill, Molly Rankin and Rosemary Scott. [5] Broadway [ edit ] 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. 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]I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Alan realises that Joan has feelings for Robin and steps out of the way. Unfortunately, a life with Robin really doesn’t make her happy. A BBC Radio 4 adaptation was directed by Sue Wilson and broadcast on 12 August 1994 (later re-broadcast on 23 May 2010 over BBC Radio 7). The cast included Marcia Warren as Mrs. Conway, Belinda Sinclair as Kay, John Duttine as Alan, Toby Stephens as Robin, Emma Fielding as Carol, Stella Gonet as Madge, Amanda Redman as Hazel, John McArdle as Ernest and Christopher Scott as Gerald. [12]

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