J.B. Priestley (Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists) PDF

J.B.
Priestley
J.B. Priestley is the first book to provide a detailed and up to date

analysis of the enormous contribution made by this playwright,
novelist, journalist and critic to twentieth century British theatre.
Priestley was often criticised for being either too populist or
too experimental and this study unpicks the contradictions of a
playwright and theatre theorist popular with audiences but too
often dismissed by critics, describing and analysing in detail not
only his plays but also their specific historical and contemporary
productions.
Using a combination of archive, review and critical materials,
the book relocates Priestley as a theatre theorist of substance as
well as a playwright who challenged theatre conventions and
assumptions about audience expectations, at a time when theatre
was considered both conservative and lacking in innovation.
Professor Maggie B. Gale is Chair of Drama at the University

of Manchester, England. Her published works include British
Theatre Between the Wars and The Cambridge Companion to the
Actress.
ROUTLEDGE MODERN AND
CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS
Series editors: Maggie B. Gale and Mary Luckhurst
Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists is a new series

of innovative and exciting critical introductions to the work of
internationally pioneering playwrights. The series includes recent
and well-established playwrights and offers primary materials on
contemporary dramatists who are under-represented in secondary
criticism. Each volume provides detailed cultural, historical and
political material, examines selected plays in production, and
theorises the playwright’s artistic agenda and working methods,
as well as their contribution to the development of playwriting
and theatre.
Volumes currently available in the series are:
J.B. Priestley by Maggie B. Gale

Federico García Lorca by Maria M. Delgado
Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell by Barbara Ozieblo and
Jerry Dickey
Future volumes will include:
Caryl Churchill by Mary Luckhurst

Mark Ravenhill by John Deeney
Jean Genet by David Bradby
August Strindberg by Eszter Szalczer
Anton Chekhov by Rose Whyman
J.B. Priestley
Routledge Modern and
Contemporary Dramatists
Maggie B. Gale
First published 2008 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
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collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2008 Maggie B. Gale
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gale, Maggie B. (Maggie Barbara), 1963–
J.B. Priestley/Maggie B. Gale.
p. cm. — (Routledge modern and contemporary dramatists)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Priestley, J. B. (John Boynton), 1894–1984. I. Title.
PR6031.R6Z568 2008
828′.91209—dc22 2007027018
ISBN 0-203-93262-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 10: 0–415–40242–5 (hbk)

ISBN 10: 0–415–40243–3 (pbk)
ISBN 10: 0–203–93262–5 (ebk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–40242–2 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–40243–9 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–203–93262–9 (ebk)
Contents
List of illustrations vii

Acknowledgements ix
Part I
Life, politics and theory 1
1 Life, career and politics 3
2 The function and practice of theatre: visions,

theories and critical responses 27
Part II
Key plays 59
3 The family, gender and sexual relations 61
4 Time and the time plays 89
5 Work and visions of dystopia/utopia 107
Part III
Key plays/productions 123
6 The Good Companions 125
7 An Inspector Calls 139

vi Contents
8 Johnson Over Jordan 164
Afterword 180
Appendix: London productions and revivals of
J.B. Priestley plays 1931–59 184
Notes 188
Bibliography 194
Index 204
Illustrations
1 J.B. Priestley: wartime broadcasting for the BBC 11

2 Dangerous Corner, Lyric Theatre, London, 1932 66
3 Ever Since Paradise, New Theatre, London, 1947 87
4 They Came to a City, The Globe, London, 1943 117
5 The Good Companions, His Majesty’s Theatre,
London, 1931 130
6 The Good Companions, film directed by Victor
Saville, 1933 134
7 An Inspector Calls, directed by Alexander Tairov,
Kamerny Theatre, Moscow, 1945 145
10 An Inspector Calls, film directed by Guy Hamilton,
1954 153
11 An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry,
National Theatre, London, 1992 160
12 Johnson Over Jordan (the nightclub scene), directed
by Basil Dean, New Theatre, London, 1939 173
13 Johnson Over Jordan (Patrick Stewart as Robert
Johnson), directed by Jude Kelly, West Yorkshire
Playhouse, Leeds, 2001 176
14 Johnson Over Jordan (the nightclub scene),
directed by Jude Kelly, West Yorkshire Playhouse,
Leeds, 2001 178
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the University of Manchester, the Arts and

Humanities Research Council, England, and Michael and Lara
Gale, Austin, Texas for financing and supporting this project.
Colleagues and friends have patiently provided both comradely
and intellectual support, especially Ann Featherstone, Liz A. Gale,
John F. Deeney, John Stokes, Maria Delgado, Mary Luckhurst,
Rose Whyman, Sue Gilligan, James Thompson, Viv Gardner and
Matthew Frost. Thanks also to Talia Rodgers and Minh-Ha
Duong at Routledge, to Tom Priestley and to Jim Gill at PFD for
permission to publish extensively from Priestley’s works. I am
grateful to Norma Campbell Vickers and Alena Kyncl for
permission to reprint their late husbands’ photographs of pro-
ductions of Priestley plays, and to Keith Pattison and the West
Yorkshire Playhouse for the photographs of Patrick Stewart in
Jude Kelly’s Johnson Over Jordan (2001). Research assistants
at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin,
Texas, the Theatre Museum, London and Richard Mangan at
the Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection
provided vital materials with great patience. Particular thanks
to Alison Cullingford in Special Collections at the University
of Bradford Library: her expertise and kindness have been
invaluable. All extracts and material from the works of J.B.
Priestley are reproduced by permission of PFD (www.pfd.co.uk)
on behalf of the Estate of J.B. Priestley. Excerpt from Part I
of ‘Burnt Norton’ in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, copyright The
Estate, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Permission to
x Acknowledgements
reprint the same, gratefully acknowledged from Faber and Faber
Ltd, England.
This book is dedicated to my beloved and greatly missed father
Tony Gale (23 April 1937–22 August 2006), whose J.B. Priestley
play volumes I stole as a teenager.
Part I
Life, politics
and theory
1 Life, career and politics
Overview
J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) was born into a lower-middle-class
family in Bradford, England at the close of the nineteenth century.
A playwright, novelist, essayist, broadcaster and socialist-
humanist, he left school in his mid-teens, and went into the wool
trade as a clerk. It was during this period, before his time on the
Front in France during the First World War (1914–18), that he
began a writing career which was to span almost a century, one
in which much of the vast social and cultural change was reflected
in the work he produced.
His career demonstrated a new thread of mobility in the

classes from working and lower middle to middle-class
professional which remained an unrealised dream in general
but was supremely epitomised in his own life. So many phases
in his development were representative of unfolding English
history between the years 1894 and 1984.
(Brome 1988: 485)
John Boynton (or ‘Jack’) Priestley was one of the most prolific
and versatile English writers of the twentieth century: he worked
across journalism, criticism, literature, theatre, film and radio. He
experienced varying levels of success in each medium, and rarely
worked solely in any one field at any one time. A socialist at heart
and in practice, he believed that the creative arts, both in terms
4 Life, politics and theory
of production and consumption, had a vital importance to society
at large and to the individual in particular. Priestley was both a
populist and an intellectual, a man of letters and a man of the
people, and his plays remain popular and have retained a
remarkable cultural currency in the present day. Although much
critical reference is made to his written output in general, this
volume focuses on Priestley the playwright, theatre theorist and
practitioner; he wrote a great deal about theatre, the arts and
cultural production, as well as writing over thirty works for the
stage. Like Bertolt Brecht, he did not sit quietly in the darkened
auditorium while others produced his work, nor did he rely on
others to find theatres in which to produce it. Throughout his
theatre career, he was a proactive playwright, setting up a
production company, keeping a close eye on critical debates and
trying to find ways in which he could push the possibilities of
playwriting as a creative art into new frontiers and forms. Others
have also seen a parallel with Brecht.
I see him . . . as in one way to be bracketed with Noël

Coward. He’s prolific, his plays work, they generally only
have one set and a reasonable size of cast . . . He’s practical,
he’s a man of the theatre. But in another sense he can justly
be compared with Brecht, he goes as deep . . . when one
realizes what his plays are really about, then one perceives
that he is just as big as Brecht, that his themes have huge
sweep and grandeur.
(Braine 1978: 141)
Although a socialist by conviction, Priestley did not share Brecht’s

Marxist leanings, but was equally not a ‘party’ man. He was
influenced by developments in scientific and political thinking as
well as by Jungian psychology: his processing of these develop-
ments filtered through into his plays as well as his theories of
theatre, drama and the social function of the arts.
The analysis of Priestley’s contribution to British theatre
generally and playwriting in particular remains somewhat bound
to the received critical and historical framing of British theatre
between the two world wars and into the early 1950s. Here,
Life, career and politics 5
dominant historical narratives focus on subsidised theatres and
on 1956 and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger as a perceived
turning point in the development of drama in Britain. Although
challenged by a number of recent theatre histories (see Gale 1996;
Luckhurst 2006; Rebellato 1999), such narratives privilege the
marginal avant-garde and the non-commercial sections of the
industry: such ‘longstanding . . . prejudices’, which hark back to
the nineteenth century binary oppositions of the legitimate and
the non-legitimate theatre, mean that other key periods and kinds
of work remain unexamined (see Savran 2004). The context in
which Priestley worked was that of a commercial theatre industry,
differing in essence from its European counterparts in its complete
lack of government subsidy. J.B. Priestley fought this system,
through the ways in which he operated as a playwright and a
producer, but it provided the economic background to his theatre
career. Some theatre histories of the period (see Chothia 1996;
Davies 1987) would have us believe that there was nothing of
worth being produced in the commercial West End during the
interwar years (1918–39), the period which saw Priestley’s debut
works in production. Others, however, have pointed to the
breadth and depth of plays produced and to the fact that the
commercial production system relied on cross-fertilisation from
all areas of the ‘theatre world’ – including the independent, club
and subscription theatres (Barker and Gale 2000; Kershaw 2004).
Thus, a reappraisal of Priestley’s practice in the theatre requires
a close examination of the context in which that work took place.
This volume offers a re-evaluation of Priestley’s theatre writing
from a number of perspectives. Part I provides an overview of the
political and ideological beliefs which drove his work, as well as
a documentation and analysis of his theories of theatre and drama,
his critique of the critics and his vision of the function of theatre
as a form of cultural production. For Priestley theatre helped to
define culture, in a society which was undergoing radical and swift
social and economic transformation. In Part II, his major plays
are grouped thematically and are discussed both in terms of their
original production and reception and in terms of the ensuing
critical analyses by academics and theatre historians. Finally, Part
III focuses on a range of productions of three of his works, The
Good Companions (1931), An Inspector Calls (1946) and Johnson
Over Jordan (1939). Important materials from major theatre
archives, as well as evidence from biographies, autobiographies,
interviews and critical works are brought to bear on this re-
evaluation of J.B. Priestley, one of the most popular, prolific, and
often experimental, British playwrights of the twentieth century.1
Life and career: from Bradford to the

West End
There are a number of biographies of J.B. Priestley, all of which
offer a different focus in terms of their construction of a picture
of Priestley’s life (Brome 1988; Cook 1997; Cooper 1970). Many
of them borrow heavily from Priestley’s own autobiographical
writing (Priestley 1940, 1941a, 1962, 1977), often without,
however, attempting to authenticate or reflect upon the ways in
which Priestley wrote about himself. Similarly many of the
biographies fail to identify or challenge the various social, political
and academic prejudices which have historically underpinned
readings of his work. This part of the book uses the broad
framework of these collective ‘depictions of a life’ as a means of
charting the interrelationship between his life, career and
ideological thinking. The son of a school teacher in the northern
industrial community of Bradford, and a student of literature
studying on an officer’s scholarship at the University of Cambridge
immediately after the First World War, his origins influenced the
development of his political thinking and in turn filtered into every
aspect of his career in theatre.
after the war I turned away from politics, not because my

political sympathies had changed but because I felt I needed
a private world of a few friends and a lot of books . . . I
became the typical Englishman behind his high wall and
closed door . . .
Oddly enough it was not politics but the Theatre that
opened the door and broke down the wall for me. In the early
Thirties I turned from novels and essays to plays, and it
happened that from the first I took more interest in the actual
production of my plays than the average playwright does
. . . I found myself at last leaving the quiet study . . . for the
bustle and confusion and the concerted effort of theatrical
production. . . . There might be more heartbreaks in the
production of a play than in the publication of a book, but
there was also much more fun. And something too that was
more than fun – a sense of kinship with my fellow workers
in the Theatre.
(Letter to a Returning Serviceman, Priestley 1945b: 27)
J.B. Priestley’s professional work in the theatre began in the early

1930s, and as he suggests in his Letter to a Returning Serviceman
(1945), this new career pathway led him to a different, more
collective way of working. Biographers and critics vary as to the
degree to which they investigate Priestley’s theatre work: some
focus on his plays more than others (Atkins 1981; Braine 1978;
Evans 1964). There is, however, an overall acknowledgement that
Priestley’s theatre work was central to his career from the early
1930s through to the late 1950s. Equally, theatre features in a
great deal of his fictional writing, in novels such as The Good
Companions (1929), Jenny Villiers (1947) and Lost Empires
(1965); later in life he used theatre as a metaphor for modes of
self-reflection and the processing of internal dialogue.
We carry a theatre around with us, and we should enjoy the

comedy inside. What goes on in our inner world can soon be
turned into an enjoyable comedy if we stop hugging and
petting our injured vanity, our jealousy and envy.
(Priestley 1972: 32–3)
Here, late in life, Priestley is referring to the mediation of public

and private selves, a process with which he was familiar and one
that is vital in the biographical works of which he is the subject.
Thus Vincent Brome is rather scathing about a great deal of
Priestley’s writing (Brome 1988), but focuses very heavily on
Priestley’s private relationships with women; his three wives, his
supposed mistresses, and on his relationships with his children.
Judith Cook, emphasising empirical social and historical research,
gives a more balanced, detailed and contextualised analysis of
Priestley’s life. She stresses the early influences of his childhood
community and his years spent in action in France during the First
World War (Cook 1997). Doubtless, these years, from September
1914 where he witnessed the atrocities of the war as a soldier in
the trenches, to March 1919, when he left the army, hugely
influenced Priestley’s writing life. Yet a number of critics have
pointed to the fact that Priestley himself wrote relatively little
about his war experience (Atkins 1981; Cooper 1970). He did not
find in war ‘the deeper reality we all look for’; it did not transform
him into an artist in the way it did others of his generation
(Priestley 1962: 87).
When I look back on my life . . . these four-and-a-half years

shrink at once; they seem nothing more than a queer bend in
the road full of dust and confusion. But when memory really
goes to work and I re-enter those years, then just because they
used up all my earlier twenties . . . they suddenly turn into a
whole epoch, almost another life in another world . . . I think
the First War cut deeper and played more tricks with time
because it was first, because it was bloodier, because it came
out of a blue that nobody saw after 1914. The map that came
to pieces in 1939 was never the apparently solid arrangement
that blew up in 1914.
(Priestley 1962: 86)
For Priestley, dramatic representations of the 1914–18 war,

relatively late to arrive on the interwar West End stages (see Barker
and Gale 2000), such as R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End
(1928), presented trench life as ‘dry and commodious’ rather like
a ‘suite in some Grand Hotel’ (Priestley 1962: 99–100). Priestley’s
war finds its way into his writing through a continual return to
the pre-1914 period, and through his sustained effort to encourage
a process of self reflection in terms of our responsibilities as
members of a community both nationally and internationally,
rather than in overt and detailed accounts of his own actual war
experience. His political views were sharpened and clarified, first
by his war experience, and second through his time as a student
in the early 1920s at Cambridge, which, much like Oxford, was
still the enclave of the upper-middle and ruling classes. Here
Priestley, whose promotion to the officer class had brought with
it the possibility of a university grant, largely studied among
younger men, from a very different class, predominantly from the
south of England and educated in the private sector. Again, he
does not write much about these years, during which he married,
became a father and graduated. Later in life, however, he was very
sceptical of certain types of Leavisite academic criticism which
he saw as delimiting the boundaries of the purpose and function
of literature, something which will be expanded upon later.
Following his degree, he turned down the offer of academic
employment and began what was to become a long career as an
essayist, journalist and critic. The success of his novel The Good
Companions in 1929 afforded him financial stability and the
possibility of creative experiment. By the early 1930s he began
writing for theatre; his first play was an adaptation of The Good
Companions (1931) written with Edward Knoblock. The second
was Dangerous Corner (1932), which the celebrated author and
critic Rebecca West (see Stokes 1996) thought contained ‘real
dialogue with proper nerves in the sentences’. West congratulated
him for having written so ‘rigorous and exciting’ a play, one which
‘refreshed . . . after the chopped hay of the ordinary English play’.2
Although seen by some as a relative failure in terms of its original
West End production run (Brome 1988; Cook 1997), Dangerous
Corner became one of Priestley’s most performed plays. His next
play, Laburnum Grove (1933), originally ran for over 300
performances.
During the twenty-two years which cover the interwar period,
London productions of plays rarely ran for more than 100
performances. Although occasionally there are years when the
figure for productions lasting for 100 performances or more is as
high as 46 per cent, the average figure is much lower at between
11 and 30 per cent. Unusually then, twelve of Priestley’s plays ran
for more than 100 performances, and eight of these for more than
200 during their first West End production runs. There is no
consistency in the ‘types’ of plays which proved most popular;
The Good Companions (1931), Laburnum Grove (1933), Time
and the Conways (1937), I Have Been Here Before (1937), When
We Are Married (1938), They Came to a City (1943), How Are
They at Home? (1944), Ever Since Paradise (1947) and The
Linden Tree (1947) reveal often radically different approaches
to dramatic writing. Priestley succeeded with comedy as much as
with ‘plays of ideas’ and social observation. He consistently found
audiences from the 1930s onwards. He would often have more
than one play running in the West End at any one time, as well
as simultaneous productions in continental Europe or in North
America. Equally, his work continues to receive revivals all over
the world in both professional and amateur contexts; the most
recent and extraordinary example of this was British director
Stephen Daldry’s National Theatre production of An Inspector
Calls (1946) in 1992, which transferred from the subsidised sector
into the West End, saw numerous international productions and
was still touring England in 2005 (see Chapter 7). Very few other
English playwrights could match his popularity during his heyday
and fewer still have managed to sustain their cultural currency
with audiences so consistently.
Life and career: from the West End to

the post Second World War years
It is important to stress that Priestley continued with his other
writing while working in the theatre. From the 1930s through to
the early 1950s he produced more than fifteen novels, critical and
autobiographical works. It is inappropriate to talk of Priestley’s
career in the singular: by contemporary standards he had at least
three careers running simultaneously. His autobiographical works
all give evidence of an almost workaholic attitude to his
professional life. He wrote to a regular schedule, and his life was
shaped around his work. By the early 1930s he was well into his
second marriage to Jane Wyndham Lewis (née Bannerman) and
father to five children, adoptive father to one (Cook 1997). By the
1940s he was also working in radio and film and had gained a
public celebrity status which he found somewhat intrusive as his
circle of fans grew wider and ever more quick to recognise him
in public places.
Figure 1 J.B. Priestley: wartime broadcasting for the BBC.
Priestley’s wartime radio broadcasts, known as the Sunday

night ‘Postscripts’, brought his voice into the homes of all classes
of British people. For a wartime audience he became a new kind
of ‘radio personality’: the ‘first non-politician to whom listeners
regularly tuned to hear his personal political and philosophical
views’ (Nicholas 1995: 248). Begun in early 1940, his broadcasts
stopped at his own request and then came back on air during 1941
only to be taken off again by both the BBC and the Ministry of
Information, neither of whom would admit responsibility for
doing so. Priestley himself suggests that as their political content
became more overt, with frequent references to the politics of
post-war reconstruction, the broadcasts became too controversial
(Priestley 1967a: xix). The public, however, showed great support
for his radio work as did other writers; Rebecca West wrote to
thank him for them and for Storm Jameson, writer and journalist,
they were ‘far and away the best’; she also suggested that in them
he found ‘the poetry of the English’.3 For others, Priestley’s
wartime radio broadcasts – the ‘Postscripts’ and those for the BBC
Overseas Service – had an ambassadorial quality: the high-profile
politician Ernest Bevin suggested ‘you have put over, in your own
most effective and individual way, what we are trying to do here
and, for this, the whole country owes you a debt of gratitude’.4
Those with political leanings to the right did not appreciate the
growing level of dissent in Priestley’s broadcasts, but for many,
in a war-torn England which relied on the radio for news and to
some extent for comfort, they represented the ‘voice of the people’.
Some even suggest that he ‘brought the BBC’s established
traditions of impartiality and anonymity into conflict with its new
needs: personality and mass appeal’ (Nicholas 1995: 266).
Life: a man through the eyes of others

Priestley had homes in London, on the Isle of Wight and later in
Stratford-upon-Avon; from each he worked, entertained and
travelled. His homes were often full of guests – writers, theatre
people and other friends. Priestley worked and socialised with
many of the key figures from all aspects of the British arts scene
from the 1920s onwards, although few of these were from the
so-called elitist sections of the ‘highbrow’ literary world, a point
that is taken up later in this chapter. There were the actors and
producers who worked on the many productions of his plays,
including Basil Dean, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Michael
Macowan, Irene Hentschel and John Gielgud, publishers and
critics such as Rupert Hart-Davis (see Hart-Davis 1991), and
other playwrights and writers like George Bernard Shaw and J.M.
Barrie. He also kept up a sustained correspondence with pro-
minent critics (see Agate 1946, 1948, 1949) and publicly engaged
in critical debates about literature, the arts and social issues both
in the national press and in more selective periodicals such as the
Spectator and the New Statesman. Priestley actively engaged with
public and political debate more than any playwright of his day.
A wide range of those who worked in theatre and the arts during
the first half of the twentieth century mention Priestley in their
autobiographies: their depictions of his character, on both a pro-
fessional and personal level, vary enormously. Theatre historians
have warned of the dangers of reading autobiography as somehow
an ‘authentic’ account (Postlewait 2000), although increasingly
others suggest that autobiography can be read as an expression of
experience and throw light on the relationship between the private
and public lives of those working in the theatre industries (Bratton
2003; Gale and Gardner 2004). Priestley’s own autobiographies
are often structured as travelogues or thought-diaries; he
interweaves details of the phases of his career with commentaries
on how he viewed these phases and the influence of other
contemporary thinkers on his work. The autobiographies are
reflective and often self-critical; he rarely mentions his dealings
with other ‘celebrities’ or tries to construct his ‘autobiographical
self’ around the status of others – a strategy common in the
autobiographies and biographies of many theatre people (see
Bratton 2003).
The actor Alec Guinness remembers lunches and discussions
about theatre with Priestley at the Ivy Restaurant, London
(Guinness 1997: 54), one of the haunts of the celebrity elite, while
Charlie Chaplin counted him among the friends he would always
try to visit when in London (Chaplin 1964: 516). The fact of his
class origins and his physical largeness often feature in
autobiographical portrayals, and the image of ‘Jolly Jack Priestley’
is frequently located as a counterpoint to his strong political
beliefs, his allegedly gruff manner and his obsession with work.
Biographers, as already indicated, might stress the frequency of
his extra-marital affairs; thus Brome (1988) insists that he
hounded the actress Peggy Ashcroft while others present the affair
as being more mutual (Cook 1997; O’Connor 1988). For
O’Connor, Priestley was at the height of his ‘fame and power’ in
the early 1930s: ‘Forceful and strong, his heavy build made him
appear solid and reassuring to women’ (O’Connor 1998: 25). Yet
he also suggests that Ashcroft found herself put off by Priestley’s
‘potato face, his gruff manner and brooding personality’
(O’Connor 1998: 27). Whatever the appeal, her affairs with other
theatre practitioners of the era – Theodore Komisarjevsky and
Michel St Denis – suggest that she was attracted by Priestley’s
politics and his search for an innovative theatre which offered
more than superficial entertainment.
Depictions of Priestley’s personality by those who knew him
also vary and range from popular author of fiction and chronicler
of English life and humour, to loud proclaimer of socialism or
arrogant man of letters and social critic. Alec Guinness’s memory
of a reported conversation with Ralph Richardson, one of
Priestley’s favourite actors, who performed in a number of his
plays, attests to a certain snobbery about Priestley’s wealth and
class origins. Richardson remembers being cut out of Priestley’s
circle for a short while after commenting that his ‘brand new and
flashy car’ was vulgar (Guinness 1986: 271). The impression given
by Guinness, notably after Priestley’s death, is one of a rather
controlling and egocentric man with more money than sense, and
an aesthetic taste which hinted at his class origins in its effect of
displaying his wealth. Such depictions reveal English social
prejudice about the status of earned as opposed to inherited
wealth. Certainly, Priestley had to scrape a living until the early
1930s; he had no private income and was financially responsible
for a young family. Others, like the writer Ted Willis, remember
Priestley’s extraordinary generosity: he once offered Willis enough
money to support himself for a year so that he could write in
relative economic freedom (Willis 1991: 13–14).
In contrast to the media construction of ‘Jolly Jack’, Priestley
often contributed to the depiction of himself as surly and arrogant.
One construction of a reported conversation between Priestley
and Binkie Beaumont, the premier West End producer from the
1930s and 1940s, shows Priestley as gruff and dismissive. His
response to Beaumont – of whose taste and management style
Priestley openly disapproved – when asked if he would write a
star ‘vehicle’ for one of Beaumont’s contracted actors was, ‘I’ve
no time for bloody stars or the star system. If I had my own way,
we wouldn’t have them. Just a lot of good actors’. According to
Beaumont’s biographer they never communicated again (Huggett
1989: 540). Yet it was Tennant Plays, the educational branch of
Beaumont’s company, H.M. Tennant Ltd, which produced the
long running They Came to a City in 1943 (Duff 1995: 54).
Priestley had reported the conversation to Huggett in the 1980s,
verifying the myth of hostility between the two men and the
different aspects of the theatre scene which they represented, while
Huggett wanted to pitch Beaumont as an entrepreneur who had
to work against the odds.
Priestley’s later autobiographical writing reveals a man deep
in thought about his professional achievements (see Priestley
1972, 1977). But just as in reality the lines between the terrains
of his professional life were blurred, so too he found affirmation
from artists with very different political and professional profiles.
Many of those who worked with him in theatre found his intensity
and seriousness daunting, and this is often reflected in the ways
in which they ‘narrativise’ their experiences of him. But the
numerous Priestley archives, which include letters from Noël
Coward, Somerset Maugham, Terence Rattigan and T.S. Eliot,
among others traditionally seen as being from the political right,
present a somewhat different picture. Aspects of Priestley’s work
and his personality were admired from all corners of the
ideological boxing ring. The complexities of these relationships
say more about the nature of the auto/biographical industry and
the varying constructions of theatre history, than they do about
Priestley’s personality, one which was at the same time extrovert
and yet deeply introverted. This point is perhaps best illustrated
through his correspondence with the psychologist Carl Jung,
whose ideas greatly influenced Priestley from the 1930s onwards.
For Jung, Priestley’s was a ‘friendly human voice among the stupid
and malevolent noises issuing from the scribbler infested jungle’,
and having read a number of his plays and novels he noted:
I was particularly impressed by the two aspects of your

personality. Your one face is so much turned to the world
that one is surprised, again and again to meet another face
which is turned to the great abyss of all things . . . I appreciate
the superhuman faculty of looking at things with a straight
and with an inverted eye.5
Jung’s analysis of Priestley, who had visited him on a number

of occasions as well as circulating his theories to a British public
more familiar with Freudian ideas (Rose 1985), describes a man
who was able to be on the outside looking in, at the same time as
being in the middle of, and often the cause of, events. This is as
true of the various personal depictions of Priestley, as it is of an
overview of his work. He did not suffer fools gladly but was
always prepared to support and promote the social ‘underdog’.
Priestley’s success and popularity in the 1920s and 1930s
afforded him a prominent social position and his lecture tours,
broadcasts and journalism as well as his literary work, brought
him into contact with political figures and campaigns throughout
the interwar years and well into the 1960s. By the 1960s, now
married to Jacquetta Hawkes, an anthropologist with whom he
had shared political campaigning and co-written, among other
works, the experimental play Dragon’s Mouth (Hawkes and
Priestley 1952), Priestley’s energies were spent writing accessible
social and literary histories and critical essays such as The
Edwardians (1970), English Humour (1976) and the extra-
ordinarily accomplished Literature and Western Man (1960). In
his eighties he summed up his life in the following terms:
I have been on the whole a very lucky man. I have helped to

bring up a flourishing healthy family, who always seem glad
to see me. My work has gone all over the world. I have been
able to write just what I wanted to write and have been
handsomely rewarded for it. If I have refused various honours,
it is chiefly because my name has been able to stand alone,
without any fancy handles to it.
Career: the politics of the ‘new’ criticism

– Priestley and the modernists
Much of Priestley’s autobiographical writing pays witness to his
extensive travels in the United States, Egypt and continental
Europe. It also reveals his capacity for detailed analyses of other
cultures and ways of living (see Priestley 1940, 1946). With his
novels and plays published and performed in many languages, he
was an international ‘bestseller’ and a well-known public figure,
though not always well liked (Thomson 1986). His practical and
intellectual engagement with ‘other cultures’ facilitated Priestley’s
ability to comment on world events and to critique modes of
behaviour which he saw as counterproductive in terms of their
impact on the improvement of the social fabric of life. His class
origins and political beliefs set him apart from many of his literary
contemporaries, in part because of his explicit insistence on the
interrelationship between ideology, politics and the purpose and
nature of art.
For Priestley, literary criticism had changed immensely in its
intent and purpose after the First World War. In the 1920s and
early 1930s the long novel was no longer in favour, either with
publishers, for whom it was expensive to produce and market,
or with the new critics for whom it lacked the ‘modernist’ touch.
Priestley was viewed negatively by these ‘new’ critics such as F.R.
Leavis, because he was seen as appealing to a middle-brow
audience and to a mass market. This audience was the negative
side of the ‘mass-civilisation/minority-culture split, diagnosed as
the chief condition of cultural ill-health’ by the all powerful Leavis,
who Priestley, in turn, attacked on a number of occasions
(Priestley 1956; Williams and Matthews 1997: 2). John Atkins
suggests that Leavis considered himself ‘a most important critic’,
and had nagging at the back of his mind ‘the suspicion that
Priestley and his kind had a good deal of significance’ (Atkins
1981: 268). Literary and cultural critic John Carey (1992) has
pointed to the modernist cultural anxiety about the ‘masses’, their
growing numbers and increasing role as consumers in an emergent
commodified culture. For Carey, the modernists did not wish art
to be a mass affair, he even goes so far as to suggest that they
wanted art and literature to be inaccessible to the masses, for
aesthetics to override any possibilities of empathetic connection.
Like Priestley, Carey also notes that the idea of the ‘masses’, as
explored in novels by writers as different as E.M. Forster and
Virginia Woolf, was in fact a construct, a way of overcoming
cultural anxiety as experienced by the privileged classes, and a
response to the gradual democratisation of education and the
growth of the media which happened in the early part of the
twentieth century (Carey 1992: 8–16; Priestley 1941b). These
were social developments which Priestley, albeit with a critical
eye, celebrated. Although Carey’s views have been critiqued by
some as oversimplifying modernist influences on European art,
they are views with which Priestley would have had some
sympathy. He saw the ‘new’ critics as ‘demonising the objective
tone of the great literature of the past’, instead, heralding literature
which displayed ‘an unhealthy obsession with the self and its
workings’ (Atkins 1981: 263).
The journalist-critics I knew . . . were rapidly losing that all-

important central influence, they were no longer capturing
the intellectual young. . . . 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: severe and
high priests moved in. 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. As
their influence grew, I was out-of-date before I even began.
. . . What was produced by the extrovert, facing the outer
world, was simply so much popular entertainment, not
Literature at all . . . the qualities looked for and most highly
regarded were originality, strangeness and intensity . . . what
no longer counted . . . were breadth and vitality.
(Priestley 1962: 153–4)
Indeed his analysis that he was seen as some kind of ‘Quisling of

letters. No longer a man and a brother . . . “a best seller”’
(Priestley 1962: 184), is borne out by Virginia Woolf’s famous
condemnation of him as a ‘tradesman of letters’.
At the age of 50 Priestley will be saying ‘Why don’t the

highbrows admire me? It isn’t true that I only write for
money.’ He will be enormously rich; but there will be that
thorn in his shoe – or so I hope. Yet I have not read, & I
daresay shall never read, a book by Priestley. . . . And I invent
this phrase for Bennett & Priestley ‘the tradesman of letters’.
(Bell 1980: 318)
Woolf’s gleeful dismissal of Priestley, whose work she non-
chalantly admits to never having read, is indicative both of class
snobbery and of what Priestley identified as the ready position of
the new critics to undermine writers whose work gained popu-
larity in a growing market. Woolf’s diaries, ironically, are full of
details about how much she earned from reviewing and criticism,
and she often notes the number of her books sold, pleased that
her name is getting known (Bell 1980: 149). 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. Priestley’s son Tom, a film and documen-
tary maker, has suggested that in fact Priestley was persistently
the victim of critical social snobbery and this, in effect, matches
John Carey’s analysis of the new criticism.6 For Priestley, however,
it was more to do with suffering from the ‘fixed idea, itself an
indictment of our whole culture, that anything widely popular
must necessarily be bad. . . . Sales figures criticism is simply a
fraud’ (Priestley 1962: 184): he felt that he was ‘too conventional
for the avant-garde, too experimental for Aunt Edna’ – that his
work was critically viewed as being somehow too populist for the
elite yet too impenetrable for ‘ordinary’ folk (Priestley 1962:
225–6).
Clearly, Priestley’s critical reception as a novelist was influenced
by factors beyond the texts themselves. The ‘new critics’ were keen
on the emerging modernist aesthetic which demanded a new
literature after 1918. The majority of this ‘new’ literature came
in large part from a social class to which Priestley did not belong.
He was a professional writer and an intellectual but there were
real financial implications to his professional activity; he had no
family money to fall back on should he fail to get published. In
retrospect, however, Priestley had more in common with the
modernists than the contemporary critique of his work suggests;
a strong sense of the urban/rural divide, an interest in the idea and
experience of time (see Levenson 2004), a desire to experiment
with form – especially in theatre – and a repeated investigation
of the psyche and so on. 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
Man (1960). In fact, it is in this book that he best sums up his
attitude to the modernist phase:
The truth is that . . . the relative view is still the more sensible,
impatient dichotomies are still unjustified and misleading.
People cannot be either justly or profitably divided . . . into
art-takers and art-refusers, into readers of Literature and
consumers of trash, into the élite and the masses.
For Priestley the function and social reach of literature in the

1920s and 1930s had changed, not only because of increased
leisure time among working people but also because of develop-
ments in media which catered more to the visual senses, such as
film. This was not a criticism of film per se – he even suggests
that Charlie Chaplin brought to film the humour which Dickens
had brought to literature and praised his powers of social
observation and expression (Priestley 1940: 194) – rather, that
the post First World War generation was the first for whom visual
stimulus was the dominant mode (Priestley 1960: 332). 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. He considered Virginia
Woolf, much of whose criticism and prose he admired, to be
absorbed by her own ‘absolutist intolerant theory’ predicated on
internal dialogue and self-absorption (Priestley 1960: 426), and
argued that those who were trying to be ‘poetic’ in the theatre –
such as Christopher Fry, W.H. Auden and T.S. 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. Thus, in critiquing Sean
O’Casey’s Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946), Priestley felt that
O’Casey’s form, ‘a kind of verbal opera’, where we are left with
the ‘Opera without the orchestra’, meant that the dramatic action
was lost, that the poetic form did not work as stage dialogue. 7
According to Priestley, T.S. Eliot had almost solved this problem
with The Family Reunion (1939), which Priestley’s production
company, the London Mask Theatre, had produced in 1939, but
here, again, the poetic language did not work well in the theatre,
and for Priestley in theatre, ‘a miss is a good as a mile’.8
Thus, Priestley often worked against the interwar literary and
academic critics who were concerned with defining the literature
of their generation in terms of a modernist aesthetic. He battled
with them in the press and in his other writings: he believed that
literature could educate and enlighten, but that it was also there
to be enjoyed, and to reflect on the human condition in a fast
changing culture.
Politics: the politics of class and social

action
For Priestley the speed of technological change, and its effect on
the populace so shocked by the events of the First World War,
was not mirrored by real social change in terms of the class
structures which had so dominated British society before the war.
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 2000).
Letter to a Returning Serviceman (1945) is predicated on a
comparative analysis of the social and private world to which
Priestley had returned as a young man after the First World War,
and that of the immediate post Second World War, a war in which
he was too old to fight. Written to an imaginary returning soldier
‘Robert’, Priestley critiques the way in which the post First World
War national press and the government tried to persuade the
‘reformer, the revolutionary . . . who said there must be no more
of this murderous nonsense’, that he could in fact relax, that no
such war would ever happen again (Priestley 1945b: 4). Of course,
they were wrong and Priestley tries to encourage the ‘returning
soldier’ to keep a wary eye on social policy and political rhetoric
now that the Second World War is over.
There was a time around 1940, when we were able to

convince a lot of people that only a diseased and rotten society
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. Tory gentlemen who have clearly not learned any-
thing, and now never will, confidently offer themselves as our
guardians again, assuming that because they choose to forget
the sickening muddle, darkening into tragedy, of the Twenties
and Thirties, we shall have forgotten too.
(Priestley 1945b: 6)
Priestley notes that although many of the old ruling class were
‘living in the past’, there were many who still held real political
and economic power – the ‘tough fellows behind the huge
monopolies and cartels, the secret emperors and warlords of
finance and industry’ (Priestley 1945b: 15). His analysis has a
Marxist flavour in terms of its expressed understanding of the
interrelationship between the economy, social power and cultural
production. He encourages the ‘returning serviceman’ to have high
expectations of his own social worth and ability to change his
public world, and to
refuse with scorn the great dope-dreams of the economic

emperors and their sorcerers and Hollywood sirens. Don’t
allow them to inject you with Glamour, Sport, Sensational
News, and all the De-luxe nonsense, as if they were filling you
with an aesthetic.
Priestley’s progressive political outlook combined his under-

standing of the class system with an analysis of power structures
and the social propaganda of the political right.
The experienced realities of social inequality during Priestley’s
time in the army, where the officers, mainly drawn from the
aristocracy and ruling classes, maintained their positions of
privilege, affirmed his belief that privilege was not to do with
wealth. Privilege was tied into an embedded class system which
even the circumstances of war could not undermine: ‘I served four
and a half years in the army, where money does not count for
much, and privilege, carefully adjusted according to rank and then
very strongly enforced, counts for a lot’ (Priestley 1940: 102–3).
He criticised George Bernard Shaw for believing that a redis-
tribution 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 any-
thing 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.
(Priestley 1940: 102–3)
Using the example of a post-revolutionary Russia, he notes that

producing a simplified social structure through wealth distribution
has not created an ‘equal’ society; here the old class system has
gone only to be replaced by another which is even more ‘iron
bound’ (Priestley 1940). Priestley’s belief that the class system and
the easy manner in which power had essentially remained in the
hands of the few – despite the genuine upheaval of war –
underpinned much of his writing and especially his plays. An
Inspector Calls (1946) or They Came to a City (1943) demand
of the audience that they consider their own role in the main-
tenance of the class system and suggests an appraisal of alternative
social structures and modes of behaviour. The First World War
had created the fantasy that we might get rid of ‘feudal Britain
for ever, but soon the ranks of privileged persons closed up’.
Priestley maintained that we ‘are not a democracy, but a
plutocracy roughly disguised as an aristocracy’ (Priestley 1941a:
224–5).
Although J.B. Priestley was not a ‘party man’, he sustained a
practice of social and political observation and critique in much
of his work and his alignment with political causes was varied
and complex; his ‘voice was prominent amongst those of the
radical polemicists’ (Thomson 1986: 5). ‘Instrumental in the
forming and success of CND [the Campaign for Nuclear Dis-
armament] as a major public protest movement’ in 1958 (T.
Priestley 1997: 64), Priestley shared the British public’s concern
with the Conservative government’s decision to fund the manu-
facture of nuclear arms. He wrote and campaigned fervently for
CND but resigned after the organisation became established and
was run through large and more democratic meetings. According
to Diana Collins, another of the organisation’s founders, his then
wife Jacquetta Hawkes thought Priestley a ‘great resigner’ (Collins
1994: 23). He writes very little about the specifics of his campaign
work in his autobiographies, either for theatre organisations such
as the International Theatre Conference or the International
Theatre Institute or for ‘leftist’ groups like the 1941 Committee
(Waters 1994: 220). Similarly neither he nor his biographers
mention his work as one of the founding members for the
Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) and its charitable wing,
the Albany Trust. The HLRS had been set up in 1958 as a direct
result of the 1957 Wolfenden Report, a government commissioned
report which called for a liberalisation of the laws discriminating
against homosexuals (Weeks 1990: 165–8). The first meetings had
been held in Priestley’s London flat at The Albany in central
London.
Dan Rebellato, however, notes Priestley’s hostility to homo-
sexuals in his attacks on the way in which the London theatre
industry was run (Rebellato 1999: 184–5; see also Priestley 1947b:
53). It is clear that Priestley felt the criminalising of homosexuality
created a kind of ghetto community and in the theatre, a secret
society which ‘enthusiastically gives its praise and patronage to
whatever is decorative, “amusing”, “good theatre”, witty in the
right way, and likely to make heterosexual relationships look
ridiculous’ (Priestley 1953: 516). Alan Sinfield (1999) also
categorises Priestley as among those who perceived the theatrical
and literary worlds of the interwar period as being dominated by
discreet ‘leisure class homosexuals’ and suggests that his ‘no-
nonsense, working class attitude to sexuality’ often meant
‘misogyny and homophobia’ (Sinfield 1999: 255). There is,
however, nothing even mildly misogynistic in Priestley’s theatre
writing. His assaults on the theatre industry were more frequently
focused on a critique of its structure, the concentration of owner-
ship and the attitude of the state to the arts in general: he
continually attacked the system and individuals he saw as
responsible for its maintenance. 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’s social action was driven by his beliefs in
social equality and human rights; homosexuals are part of the
variety of society and should not be stigmatised so that they have
to live somehow outside of it.
Priestley was involved in numerous political organisations and
for each he wrote and publicised their causes: that he never stayed
as part of those organisations for long should not undermine the
dedication with which he approached their needs. 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. His marriages, to a childhood neighbour Pat
Tempest, to Jane Bannerman, an upper-middle-class society
hostess with a deep social conscience, and finally to intellectual
and social reformer Jacquetta Hawkes, coincide with the stages
of development of his own personal beliefs and professional needs.
Similarly, his political beliefs developed, deepened and became
more strongly enveloped in his thinking about the human psyche
as his career progressed.
Life, career, politics: conclusion

Readings of Priestley’s life, career and politics themselves often
reveal certain social and academic prejudices rather than ‘truth’.
From northern lower-middle-class roots, he ended up living a life
seen by some as the ‘epitome of dignified luxury’ (Willis 1991:
12). For some his genuine intellectual capacities and concern for
social justice, were often undermined by a ‘deliberate reversion to
small-town hard-headedness’ (Ustinov 1979: 313). Equally
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. John Baxendale
suggests that literary analyses have, toward the end of the twen-
tieth century, reflected those of the elite ‘modernist’ tradition, in
locating Priestley as old fashioned and somehow reactionary
(Baxendale 2001). What is evident, however, is that analyses
of Priestley’s oeuvre have suffered from changing trends in
intellectual and critical discourse. Thus the question asked at
the beginning of Baxendale’s appraisal of Priestley’s work
on ‘Englishness’, namely, ‘what has posterity done with J.B.
Priestley?’, is a pertinent one. The overriding evidence, however,
is that whatever position the critics and intellectuals have taken
historically, Priestley’s plays and novels continue to sell. Each year
sees a significant number of productions of his plays, in both
professional and amateur theatres all over the world: more
recently, Stephen Daldry’s extraordinarily long running revival
of An Inspector Calls (1992) has become a significant cultural
phenomenon. 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.
2 The function and
practice of theatre
Visions, theories and
critical responses
I did not go to work in the Theatre and then discover, because

it helped me to earn a living, that Theatre is important. I left
other kinds of writing, which offered me a safe living and far
more peace of mind . . . because I believed the Theatre to be
important. And more than once . . . I have told myself that I
would write no more for the Theatre, would compete no
longer in its nightmare obstacle race, but always I have
returned because I have never been able to rid myself of the
conviction that the Theatre, representing the communal art
of drama, was far more important, far more deeply signifi-
cant, than most people ever imagined.
(Priestley 1947b: 69–70)
A ‘constant playgoer during his ‘teens in Bradford’ (Priestley 1970:

156), and finding solace as a young soldier in the garrison theatre
run by Basil Dean during the First World War in France (Priestley
1941c: 26–8), theatre had played a significant role in Priestley’s
life from an early age.1 His view in the opening years of the Second
World War, that actors could ‘serve’ their country as entertainers
as opposed to soldiers, during times of conflict, bears witness to
his belief that theatre had a very real social function. Priestley’s
belief in theatre is a ‘communal art’, deeply ‘significant’ both in
social and psychological terms, is one which underpins the
majority of his writing on theatre, both as practice and as a form
of cultural production.
Priestley wrote a great deal about theatre, both factual and
fictional and his theories and observations embraced a wide
spectrum of actual practice: he loved the ‘popular’ theatre of the
metropolitan and provincial music halls and variety stages. 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 1975, 1976), but noted in
the late 1920s that variety theatre had somewhat lost its edge
(Priestley 1928: 161). Similarly, when in 1928 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. Of the lead actress’s stage exit
at the end of her performance he notes:
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.
Progressive in his era, Priestley celebrated theatre as a unique live

art, the qualities of which could not be replaced by film or later,
by television, a new medium unsuitable to providing an ‘imitation
of something better done elsewhere’ (Priestley 1955: 21). Equally,
he saw drama as a component of a live art form, not as literature.
For Priestley, the actual live production of plays was dependent,
first, upon the economic dynamics and structure of a highly
commercialised and insular theatre industry, and second, on a
largely ‘academic’ tradition of criticism that supposed drama
should appeal more to a ‘highbrow’ audience.
The art of drama, as actually presented on the stage, is not a

collection of bits and pieces from the other arts, but another
kind of art, not very pure perhaps, messy and a trifle vulgar
The function and practice of theatre 29
no doubt, but existing in its own right. This is something that
many critics . . . do not seem to understand . . . [they some-
times feel that] Theatre could be raised to a far higher level
of achievement if only our poets would write for it.
For Priestley, as for practitioners from previous generations

such as Granville Barker (see Luckhurst 2006: 78–108), British
theatre was being undermined not so much by cinema or alter-
native forms of entertainment, but by a commercial management
system which lacked belief in its value either as an art form or as
an inherently necessary form of social and educational activity.
Function: the theatre as an industry

I do not . . . object to the so-called ‘commercial manager’ as
such, although . . . I believe that a large section of the Theatre
should be taken out of the control of commercial man-
agements . . . a man cannot produce plays as if he were merely
manufacturing hairpins.
Unlike the majority of its European counterparts, the British

theatre received no real subsidy until after the Second World War,
with the formation first of CEMA (Council for Encouragement
of Music and the Arts) and then the Arts Council of England in
the mid-1940s. 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 1987; Gale 1996, 2004a, 2004b; Marshall 1948). Pro-
ductions of new plays were usually funded by investors and
backers, often premiered or ‘tried out’ outside London and then
brought into a London venue. It was the economic possibilities
of a production of a play which drove investment, just as in the
‘popular’ theatre, stage acts which pulled the crowds were the
ones that got rebooked. The British theatre of this period was
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.B. Shaw, objected to (see Kennedy
1989). Priestley joined the well-established line of playwrights
who called for some kind of ‘national theatre’ rather than have
the industry run by managements with predominantly economic
as opposed to artistic interests.
Tracy C. Davis has remarked that although the ‘entertainment
industry was so radically altered by the outbreak of war in 1914,
many businesses experienced difficulty on the home front’ before
the war. She notes G.B. Shaw’s view that the popularity of ‘non-
legitimate theatre’ – the music halls and associated entertainment
venues – represented ‘consumer choice’ (Davis 2000: 354).
Equally, from the late Edwardian period onwards, the picture
palaces – home of early cinema – began to take up a significant
part of the market. The film industry based its model of distribu-
tion and the circulation of its products on that of the theatre
industry, and so could capitalise on ready made systems of touring
and attracting audiences (Davis 2000: 359). Priestley recognised
the importance of film as a possible usurper to theatre, but felt
that the economic position of the British theatre system was more
the result of poor organisation and a concentration in managerial
power, than it was related to the popularity of film. West End
theatres, by the end of the interwar period, were almost entirely
owned and run by a small and tightly knit management cartel.
Often referred to as the Group, this cartel of companies had, by
the 1940s, manoeuvred themselves into a position where they
either owned or ran most of the profitable theatres in London.
Members of one company often sat on the managerial boards of
another and so the perception of a monopoly was not unfounded.
These owner/managers produced large-scale musical comedies
and revues as well as plays and so held power over all quarters
of the entertainment industry. Unlike the pre-1914 period, most
of the owner/managers were not actors or ‘theatre people’ but
rather, investors and business people. Where the Victorian West
End was dominated – not always unproblematically so – by actor-
managers, such as Beerbohm Tree or Henry Irving, the post
1914 period saw theatres moving outside the field of artist-led
management. There are only a few exceptions to this, such as
Gladys Cooper and Frank Curzon’s management of the Playhouse
and Gerald du Maurier’s at Wyndham’s (see Morley 1979) or
the independent and privately run club and subscription theatres
like the Everyman in Hampstead, Lena Ashwell’s Century Theatre
in Notting Hill and the Embassy in Swiss Cottage. These latter
organisations were essentially privately run and made little profit
unless productions transferred into the West End.
Priestley was one of many who warned of the impact of ‘the
activities of speculating middlemen, who bought up theatre leases
with the object of re-letting at a profit to the producing man-
agements’ (Sandison 1953: 52). From 1914 onwards London
theatre buildings had become valuable real estate in an economy
where the value of land and buildings in central London had risen
significantly. Priestley recognised that the mainstream theatre was
an industry open to all who had the financial resources; that the
‘horizontal and vertical combination’ of an industry operating at
this level (Sandison 1953: 52), meant that the means of production
had been largely removed from the control of those who worked
within the theatre itself.
Theatre at present is not controlled by dramatists, actors,

producers or managers, but chiefly by theatre owners, men
of property who may or may not have a taste for the drama.
The owners . . . take too much out of the Theatre. . . . 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.
Priestley’s assessment of the impact of this form of management

drove him to form his own small production company, the
practicalities of which are examined later in this chapter. But he
also understood the complexities of, and was deeply concerned
by, this style of investment in cultural assets.
In the West End . . . the producing manager guarantees the

theatre owner a weekly minimum that covers all the owner’s
charges and expenses, but over and above that the owner
takes a substantial share of the returns. Thus if the production
is a big success, the theatre owner (who has taken no risk)
receives a fat slice of the profits. 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 . . . and expenses . . . a proportion of the
managerial expenses out of a share of the weekly returns that
amounts to 55 per cent . . . as things are at present, the
theatre-owner (or as often happens, the gang of speculators
who have moved in to secure leases) risks nothing and
contributes nothing, and marches off with most of the profit.
The managements and theatre owners received the financial

benefit of theatrical production from the initial rental and
payment of recurrent costs, and from their agreed percentage of
box office sales, regardless of any profit gained from the pro-
duction. It was the production company, not the building owners,
who stood to lose out if a production was unsuccessful. As a result
many productions were withdrawn because the short-term
potential profit margin was not high enough; there were plenty
of potential new productions waiting for a theatre venue.
Priestley also campaigned against the taxation of theatrical
productions, which impacted on the production managements,
not the building owners. The Entertainment Tax, initiated in 1916
as a wartime emergency, was applied to box office receipts, not
overall profit: the government earned from a production even if
the production management lost money. In 1924 the tax was
abolished on cheaper seats, those under the price of 1s 3d (6
pence), but this benefited the cinema more than the theatre, where
seats were costed at a higher rate. By 1942, the tax was levied at
33.3 per cent. The amateur and privately run independent theatres
were exempt from this form of taxation, just as they were from
the official censorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s office imposed
on ‘public’ theatres and so could experiment more freely (Gale
1996; Nicholson 2003, 2005). Interestingly, the West End relied
on their ethos of experimentation and profited from its successes.
As Norman Marshall noted in 1948, ‘It is astonishing how few
. . . West End successes, apart from musicals, farces and thrillers
were originally created by West End managers’ (Marshall 1948:
14–16). Noël Coward was one among many who had their early
work produced by a private/independent theatre, with the
Everyman’s production of The Vortex in 1924, and it was often
smaller production managements, like Basil Dean’s ReandeaN
Productions, which took risks with new writers such as Clemence
Dane, in the 1920s (see Gale 2005). Such speculative attitudes to
production were less likely by the 1950s, 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 1999).
Priestley’s critique of the way the theatre industry was being
run focused on the lack of impetus for the owning management
cartels to invest in new writers or in innovation. They could profit
financially from simply leasing their buildings and artistically from
the tax-free status of the independent sector, which sustained itself
through the dedication of a minority to developing new writers
and new forms. 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
1947b: 27).
For Priestley the government was negligent in maintaining the
imposition of the Entertainment Tax at such a high levy. He
pointed to the fact that the cinema industry benefited from the
terms of this taxation: it paid lower levels of tax but the theatre
provided a training ground for actors and bore the brunt of the
costs for new plays, successful ones of which were often adapted
for the cinema. Priestley was not against the cinema; he often
defended it as popular entertainment, feeling that it ‘needed
defence . . . because many intellectuals wrongly attacked [it]
sometimes showing far less wisdom and sensitiveness than the
ordinary man’ (Priestley 1940: 239). He was, however, critical
of the film industry as epitomised by Hollywood, noting rather
prophetically that the new celebrity film culture meant that the
‘head of Metro Goldwyn Mayer will soon seem much more
important than the president himself. The great questions will
suddenly change their form if not their urgency. Will Chaplin
finish his new picture? Has Garbo retired to Switzerland?’
(Priestley 1940: 177). Both the emergent film industries and
celebrity cultures in Britain and North America were reliant on
their respective theatre industries, especially during the 1920s and
1930s, and yet they had no real economic relationship with them;
cinema benefited from theatre but it was rarely a reciprocal
arrangement.
Priestley’s criticism of the management and economics of the
theatre industry can be divided into three key areas: first, the
monopoly of ownership and its impact on what was or was not
produced; second, the refusal of the state, in setting taxation levels,
to take into account the cost of production; third, the refusal of
the state to differentiate appropriately between the theatre and
the cinema in terms of levels of taxation – cinema seats were cheap
by comparison and so mostly untaxed by 1924. He stressed that
the state benefited from an art form in which it declined to invest.
Theatre was a national asset, a ‘communal art’ which required
nurturing and support:
the system . . . is all wrong . . . gambling has taken the place

of policy . . . this private commercial enterprise in the Theatre
. . . builds up no new loyalties, shows itself incapable of
sensible planning, and largely creates a feeling of insecurity
and uncertainty.
The emphasis and focus of criticism varied at different points in

his career, but still in the late 1940s, he suggested that the theatre
needed to organise itself more effectively, and challenged the lack
of substantial funding for drama during the early years of the Arts
Council: drama received 30 per cent of the total funding awarded
to music in 1944–5 (Priestley 1947b: 23).
The fact that after the Second World War rents had risen further
and fewer theatres were operational, meant that the ‘long run’
system was even more problematic than it had been before the war.
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. As
others pointed out, ‘each long run in the West End means a
potential market lost’ (Richards 1931: 231), and for Priestley this
meant that not only did the actors’ performances become stale and
complacent, but also theatre buildings were tied into productions
where even at 50 per cent audience capacity, profit could be made.
Suppose . . . a play . . . opens in a theatre that is not expensive

to run. It is not a great success; it is not a failure; and for some
time it just ‘ticks over’, neither making much money nor
losing much. If such a play can be kept going for a year or so
. . . then after that it begins to acquire a prestige and a
momentum as a long-run play . . . it will achieve a reputation
and be talked about . . . until it becomes one of the
productions that every visitor must try to see . . . and then the
box-office manager . . . finds himself selling out the house
night after night, week after week, month after month. And
the visitors pack in to see a mechanical performance, long
stereotyped . . . of a second-rate little piece, and then wonder
why they are disappointed. . . . No production is worth seeing
after it has been running, without a break, for a year.
Function: theatre and community

Priestley maintained that theatre had the power to educate and
to integrate and enliven a community, to help it to think through
the social issues which affected it. Such idealistic expectations
drove his theatre work. Statistics verify his experience of the
impact of the profit-oriented long run system; while the period
after 1918 to the mid-1930s saw a periodical increase in the
number of new plays going into production, by the late 1940s and
early 1950s a higher percentage were running for longer. Equally,
by this time the ownership and management of theatres was
concentrated and fewer new plays were going into production.
Priestley felt that audiences were being cheated, that what they
were given as entertainment did not reflect the wealth of talent
available. In the late 1940s he stated:
the economic conditions of theatrical production are

appalling, and all the old faults of the English Theatre are
strongly in evidence. 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.
The notion that the theatre was in crisis, that certain sections of
the industry should be pulled out of commercial and into some
sort of state management, was an echo of debates in the nine-
teenth century. What Priestley believed, however, was that English
audiences had been let down by a theatre production system that
prioritised the potential to make money over the nurturing of new
playwrights and established playwrights whose work was popular
but not ‘star vehicle’ material. For him the ‘English character’ was
at once untheatrical in its outward habits yet had playgoing ‘at a
deeper and more instinctive level of behaviour than it is with most
peoples’ (Priestley 1947b: 16). The state supported other arts and
built museums and galleries but the theatre ‘which is far closer to
our people than the visual arts’, received little patronage of this
sort (Priestley 1947b: 17). He saw the structure and management
of the continental theatre as a possible model which could be
adopted in England; here drama was treated as a ‘serious and
important communal activity’ (Priestley 1947b: 18). Priestley not
only blamed the commercial managements, the press and the
ruling classes for limiting the possibilities of drama within the
industry, but also was less than complimentary about audiences
who saw theatre as ‘a hazy muddle of “show business”, a vague
lucky dip, out of which a few fascinating and glamorous per-
sonalities are fortunate enough to pluck glittering “success”’
(Priestley 1947b: 52). He felt that just as Edwardian audiences
had ‘fitted in a visit to a play as part of an evening’s entertainment’
(Priestley 1970: 155), so too, some audiences during the interwar
period and into the 1950s went to theatre in order to participate
vicariously in a celebrity world.
Unusual in the amount of his own work which was produced
in theatres abroad, Priestley often berated the fact that serious
continental drama did not find its way onto West End stages often
enough despite British plays often transferring well in foreign
countries. The assertion that drama is embedded in a communal
identity in most of continental Europe is a recurrent theme in a
great deal of Priestley’s theorising on theatre. He praised the way
in which the community oriented amateur theatre, ‘from terrifying
superior persons, producing T.S. Eliot in exquisite little theatres,
to village dames and damsels giggling over their scripts in rural
Institutes’, challenged the professional theatre through the quality
of its work and the kinds of work it chose to produce. It was in
fact here that one often found productions of foreign plays
(Priestley 1947b: 51). Like the best continental subsidised theatres,
the best amateur theatre was thriving and various, frequently
experimented, and yet found a consistent and dedicated audience:
‘there are towns so filled with busy amateur players that the
visiting professionals are starved of audiences’ (Priestley 1947b:
51). Priestley even went so far as to suggest that we should try to
create a theatre in which ‘it ought to be easy to be a bright young
amateur this year and a hopeful professional the next’ (Priestley
1947b: 68). His criticism of sections of the amateur theatre was
that it tried to ape what it perceived as ‘professional practice’
rather than playing to its own strengths, and that it appeared
disorganised and directionless. 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. He
wanted a theatre culture where workers would feel, ‘that they
themselves are good and valuable citizens, that the Theatre is not
something existing precariously on the edge of the community,
but it is set squarely inside it, in an honoured position’ (Priestley
1947b: 52–3).
Vision: fictional theatre – Priestley’s
‘theatre novels’
Priestley’s attacks on the theatre industry aroused the suspicion
of ‘educational experts’ and ‘official bigwigs’ (Priestley 1947b:
69), but he insisted that we have to
see the theatre as something much more than a superior

substitute for the reading of dramatic literature. 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.
Among the playwrights of his generation, he was unusual in that

he genuinely took up the challenge of trying to change the ways
in which the industry might be run. 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. Ambitious in taking
on such a huge industry Priestley saw theatre’s potential to create
equality and a sense of belonging to a community.
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, 1938.
(quoted in Priestley 2005: 9)
The vision of a theatre which contributes to and belongs to a

community as well as offering opportunities for artistic expres-
sion, is present in Priestley’s numerous ‘theatre novels’. In works
such as The Good Companions (1929), Jenny Villiers (1947)
and Lost Empires (1965) Priestley uses theatre and performance
as a central focal point in narratives driven by themes such as
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.
Lost Empires (1965), written relatively late in Priestley’s career,
sees Richard Herncastle join his uncle, an inventive and admired
stage illusionist famous for his Indian Magician Act, on a tour of
the music halls and variety stages immediately before the First
World War. Herncastle’s journey takes the reader through
rehearsals and band calls, through the process of working out new
illusions to amaze the audience, through the trials of touring, life
in theatrical digs, backstage crime, love affairs and so on. By the
end of the novel, Herncastle has left the theatre to join the army,
and so the first stage of his right of passage ends, to be replaced
by the hardship of war. 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. Through
using the pre-war setting, Priestley expresses a critical nostalgia
toward the Edwardian period, rather than returning us to an
idealised ‘cosy England’ (Baxendale 2001). As with An Inspector
Calls (see Chapter 7) the return to this historical moment is a
device for social criticism (Braine 1978: 145).
Lost Empires was adapted for the stage by Keith Waterhouse
and Willis Hall in 1974. 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 Waterhouse/Willis production, performed by a
combined company from the Cambridge Touring Theatre and the
Birmingham Repertory, played on a cultural fascination with the
process of theatre making as well as the original novel’s swift
movement from one theatre-related location to another, shifting
from the Theatre pub scene to the stage and backstage of the
Glasgow Empire in Act I to the scene dock, London digs and the
Finsbury Park Empire in Act II. An expensive show to produce,
it was predicated on a form of nostalgia among British audiences
as reflected in the popularity of television programmes like The
Good Old Days in the 1970s. Produced as part of the BBC’s Light
Entertainment programming on and off from 1953 to the mid-
1980s. The Good Old Days aimed to replicate, albeit in a
somewhat sterilised manner, the vitality of the Victorian and
Edwardian music hall.
Later, Laurence Olivier and Colin Firth starred in Granada
Television’s lavish 1986 production of Lost Empires, which was
also successfully distributed in North America (Nown 1986).2 The
television adaptation centralises the importance of Richard
Herncastle’s emotional and sexual journey; both his experiences
on the frontline trenches and in the variety theatres of Edwardian
England serve as the foundations on which his ‘coming of age’ is
built.
The stage and television versions used different dominant
themes in their adaptations of the original Priestley novel: the stage
version exploits the appeal of theatrical spaces – those associated
with public performance, and those, such as the backstage areas,
associated with the processes of performance – using the musical
form as framing device. The television adaptation focuses on
creating an authentic replication of Edwardian variety performer/
audience experience, as the background in which Richard
Herncastle’s journey from innocence to ‘manhood’ takes place.
Neither therefore makes any attempt to remain absolutely ‘true’
to the novel, but both take from it a preoccupation with a
nostalgic theatrical space and the demystification of the processes
of theatre in terms of community and the everyday.
Priestley’s unpublished novel, with the working title of These
Our Actors, which he began in 1939, shares with Lost Empires
an emphasis on the fictionalised experience of making perfor-
mance.3 The novel is set in the Birmanpool Repertory Theatre (a
thinly disguised referent to Birmingham and Liverpool repertory
theatres), with Miss Padbury as the business manager – another
thinly disguised referent, this time to the philanthropic West
Midland’s Quaker Cadbury family. Priestley signifies a particular
form of English theatrical activity which was becoming almost
financially untenable by the time he began the novel. The English
Repertory theatres had blossomed during the early part of the
century, but by 1939, there were comparatively few left. These
theatres provided training grounds for actors as well as a steady
flow of productions of plays for regional audiences. 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 2004; Rowell and Jackson 1984).
The depiction of the Birmanpool Repertory Theatre is one of
a theatre in decline, a theatre in a ‘bleak wilderness of aldermen,
manufacturers and dubious non-conformist parsons’ (Priestley
c.1939a: 8). In contrast, Humphrey Pike, the newly employed
leading actor, still believes in the ‘magical’ possibilities of theatre.
Again, there is a focus on process, as Pike deconstructs the
experience of rehearsal.
Two things about rehearsal that are wonderful. First, you’re

seeing something brought to life – all shaped and coloured
and fixed up to the last detail . . . and the second reason why
rehearsals are exciting to people with any imagination is that
they represent a bit of secret magic. . . . Behind the closed
doors and blank face of the theatre you’re shaping and
colouring and bringing something to life . . . when you’re
done and the doors are open some . . . will come . . . and that
bit of magic will get to work on them.
(Priestley c.1939a: 24)
Pike also points out, however, that when the play is over the
‘glimpse of magic’ the audience has experienced in the auditorium
is ‘all that the theatre can give them’ (Priestley c.1939a: 38): those
in search of magic backstage after the performance will find only
the actors removing their make-up. Pike believes in a kind of
‘ethics for the performer’, whereby rather than play on the
audience’s expectations of the ‘theatrical’ and produce stereotyped
performances, an actor must continually strive to find both a
depth and freshness in their performance. This is very similar to
Priestley’s depiction of Jenny Villiers in his 1947 novel of the same
name.
Produced as a play in 1946 under the joint sponsorship of the
Arts Council, the Old Vic and the Sadler’s Wells Trust, at the
Theatre Royal in Bath on 13 March 1946, Jenny Villiers: 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.4 Jenny Villiers did not find a
London production and was then published as a novel in 1947.
Relatively few of Priestley’s biographers or literary commentators
mention the novel which, as Atkins (1981) points out, is rather
odd because of its use of dream and time shift sequences.
The novel’s hero/antihero is Martin Cheveril,
an aging and embittered playwright, who saw the theatre as

inevitably rushing towards its own extinction [and] recovers
his faith through his encounters with two hopeful young
actresses one whom he meets in the flesh and the other whom
he meets through a vagary in the time scheme.
(Atkins 1981: 163)
Cheveril, whose The Glass Door is being staged in a regional

theatre before its London transfer, is under pressure to rewrite
sections of the play. His response is that the play is a ‘serious
attempt to write about the world as it is and people as they
actually are’ (Priestley 1947a: 8), and so the last act is more
pessimistic and ‘desolate’ than the producers would like. His
leading actress does not share his pessimism about theatre which
she feels is always ‘renewing its enchantment’ (Priestley 1947a:
6), and is shocked at his statement that the theatre ‘as we know
it’, will not
last much longer. The old witchcraft’s just about wearing out
. . . I know it has always been about to die. But don’t forget
that most obstinate old invalids do at last turn their faces to
the wall. And I believe that’s what the Theatre is doing.
(Priestley 1947a: 18)
The actress accuses him of being spoilt by success and leaves him
to brood over the rewrites in the theatre green room. 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 1840s. Cheveril’s
interest in theatre and the processes of theatre making is reignited
through meeting a young actress, Jenny Villiers, who wants to
find some kind of ‘emotional truth’ on stage through ‘will,
discipline’ and ‘earnest application’ which Priestley himself later
identified, as had Stanislavski before him, as being at the centre
of the high achieving actors’ practice (Priestley 1973: 43). Cheveril
remembers the reinvigorating qualities of ‘human effort and
magic’, a combination which Atkins sees as bringing together the
‘strands’ of that which Priestley considered to be the ‘wonder of
the Theatre’ (Atkins 1981: 164). Cheveril suggests:
the whole business is symbolic, and . . . unconsciously we all

recognise that fact . . . in Theatre . . . character make-up and
props are only a shadow show . . . put away when the
performance is over . . . what is real, indestructible and
enduring is . . . the innermost and deepest feelings – the way
an artist sees his work – the root and heart of a real personal
relationship – the flame . . . burning clear . . . for all our vulgar
mess of paint and canvas and lights and advertisement, we
who work in the Theatre . . . because it is a living symbol of
the mystery of life, we help to guard and to show the flame.
(Priestley 1947a: 185–6; see also Priestley 2005: 5)
The themes of ‘human effort and magic’, of community spirit and

the application of unique human skill are prevalent in all
Priestley’s novels in which theatre and performance feature as a
narrative framework. He makes frequent use of the dynamics of
history and shifting trends in theatre and performance practice
as frameworks for these ‘theatre’ novels. Although ‘theatre as a
living symbol for the mystery of life’ seems far removed from
Priestley’s more politically driven analyses of the state of theatre,
it lies at the root of much of his writing on the subject: the notion
of theatre as somehow ‘magical’, potentially transformative and
communal, is combined with a pragmatic approach to a vision
of the ways in which the theatre industry might be restructured
in order for society to gain fully from its educative, socially
instructive and psychologically beneficial qualities.
Vision and theory combined: the

restructuring of the theatre industry
In Theatre Outlook, Priestley sets out by posing the questions
‘What is happening to our theatre now?’ and ‘What ought to
happen to it in the near future?’ (Priestley 1947b: 14). In answer-
ing the second question he cites theatre, as ‘a creative action in
progress’, a ‘corporate affair of individual perceptions and co-
operative effort’ (Priestley 1947b: 52), and suggests that the
theatre should be a place where ‘serious professional men and
women, properly trained and well-equipped, go to work as sur-
geons and physicians go to work’. His radical vision was that we
should begin with a ‘clean, bare stage, solidly set in the community
and linked with hundreds of similar sensible organisations, a stage
on which something good and true and glowing can be created’
(Priestley 1947b: 53). In order to achieve this Priestley wanted the
theatre industry restructured as a ‘kind of pyramid’ with the
founding of a number of national theatre companies, each of
which might be readily identified with different kinds of work –
one might focus on the classical repertoire, another on more
experimental plays and so on. Such companies would be run by
experienced professional artists – he uses Basil Dean, Michael
Macowan and Tyrone Guthrie as examples of possible artistic
directors. The national theatres would be run on a continental
model whereby they represented the ‘apex’ of the pyramid.
Workers from these theatres would transfer to other theatres
countrywide in order to skills-share: they would be paid a good
wage but not one which necessarily matched high commercial
rates. For Priestley (Priestley 1947b: 54–5), restructuring in such
a manner would discourage the ‘speculators, parasites and shoddy
impresarios’ whom he felt had dominated the British theatre of
the first half of the twentieth century. Instead of having these
theatres managed through a pursuit of profit, they would be
overseen by a ‘National Theatre Authority’, which to Priestley
(1947b) was more preferable to the partisan and ruling class
dominated Arts Council. Priestley’s ideas for restructuring bear a
remarkable resemblance to what has actually happened in part,
through the impact of state funding, in British theatre since the
1950s.
Priestley wanted the organisation of theatre culture to be net-
worked 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. He wanted universities to have their own drama
departments with theatres, studios and workshops, as opposed to
housing ‘drama’ within literature departments. 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. Priestley also wanted to organise the civic
theatres, suggesting that each city or larger town should have at
least ‘two good sized theatres’, one for touring companies which
might include the national theatres mentioned above, and one
for the local civic companies who would model themselves to
some extent on the national ones. The civic theatres would be run
by public corporations funded through the municipality, the Arts
Council and private donations in order that the theatre might be
financed from a number of sources and so be less susceptible to
the political contrivances of municipal governance (Priestley
1947b: 59). 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. Priestley believed they would
develop and reflect local identities and civic pride.
For smaller geographical settings – towns and villages – Priestley
suggested a ‘Group System’ theatre whereby the communities
shared amenities and organised themselves and their theatres,
many of which had fallen into disrepair before and after the
Second World War. 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. As part
of this plan, Priestley felt that the professional and amateur theatre
might mutually benefit each other with the sharing of performance
spaces and skills.
Theory: the state and the theatre

Priestley’s pyramid structure intentionally removed British theatre
from the commercial economic model. In this he shared in
common ideas which Shaw, William Archer and Granville Barker
had proposed before him. But Priestley took their ideas a step
further in that his metropolitan model showed clear pathways for
influencing theatre country-wide and not just in London. Just as
Matthew Arnold had demanded that the English should ‘organise
the theatre’ in the late 1870s (see Stokes 1972: 3–9), so Priestley
created an imaginary multilayered, interconnected national,
realisable restructuring and organisation for British theatre, based
in part on a projected ideal and in part on using what already
existed. Arnold and Priestley shared in common a belief in state
subsidy and although Priestley was aware of the many pitfalls of
such a system of financial backing, he insisted that the state should
take responsibility.
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.
. . . If the treasury actually took nothing from the Theatre,
it would still owe the Theatre something, because of the
millions it receives in Entertainment Duty from the films . . .
theatre seats, like books, are comparatively the cheapest
luxury things we can buy nowadays . . . a far greater pro-
portion of the millions collected should be returned to the
Theatre, in the form of generous subsidies to non-commercial
companies with a very high standard of work.
In The Arts under Socialism (1947) written after the Labour

landslide of 1945, Priestley suggested that a socialist society could
provide a better context for the provision of arts, claiming that,
‘the creation of and appreciation of the arts . . . is one of the ends
towards which the socialist state is the means’ (Priestley 1947c:
5–6). Art should not be treated as the ‘icing on the cake’ of social
planning and policy, rather, provision of support should be
central. 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. Priestley wanted
the state to support arts’ unions and protect its artists from
exploitation by strengthening, for example, copyright laws. He
wanted the state to set up committees which would enable rather
than inhibit: his feeling about the newly formed Arts Council at
this point, was that it was run by officials and ‘busybodies’ who
knew nothing about the theatre and cared very little for it.
Theatre critics of the era, such as James Agate, believed that
they should not get involved in ‘theatre politics’ and by
implication, that Priestley should be wary of doing so. They rarely
shared his utopian vision of the arts under socialism, as Agate’s
attitude exemplifies:
there won’t be any art under socialism. The only books, music
and pictures that have ever been worth a damn were written,
composed, painted at a time when the Czars . . . and the upper
classes whipped the lower classes for the entertainment of
their guests after dinner. I do not want books, plays and
symphonic poems written around communal wash-houses.5
Priestley was well informed about the provision of arts in

communist countries (see Priestley 1946) and understood the
pitfalls of ‘committee’ art and the types of state intervention which
had the potential to censor rather than encourage creativity.
Nevertheless, he believed that a socialist state could differentiate
from a capitalist one in refusing to be ‘terrified of the passion and
insight, the vast generosity and searching vision of the great artists’
(Priestley 1947c: 6). Art could reflect upon and build the spirit of
a generation, and in the context of post Second World War
Britain, this was a process which Priestley saw as requiring state
support and facilitation. Just as he had suggested state support
for the financial and organisational restructuring of the theatre
industry, so he urged for the state to support the arts as a
fundamental component of its future social planning. This links
Priestley directly to the progressive thinkers of his age – those who
created the community oriented Welfare State (see Addison 1977).
Theory and practice: the playwright as

interventionist – J.B. Priestley as
theatre producer
I enjoyed working in the Theatre but never saw it, as so many
people did then, as a glittering playground . . . I disliked the
West End Theatre in its glamour-gossip-column aspect.
Though often successful, I was never a fashionable play-
wright. 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 1974, quoted in Priestley 2005: 28)
Priestley strongly believed in the right, and at times the necessity,

for the playwright to act as interventionist. Perhaps because of
this, his was a ‘love/hate’ relationship with the British theatre
establishment during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. 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 play-
wrights of his generation did not also suffer under such a system:
productions with ‘star’ casts or productions of plays by play-
wrights with a track record of attracting consistent audiences were
favoured. Within this system of cultural production, a playwright
was only ever as good as their last play. Priestley often had more
than one play running in the West End, thus actually benefited
from a system which he condemned. However, from early on
Priestley took control of the production of the vast majority of
his work, by founding his own production company; it was also
through this company that a number of plays by other ‘new’
playwrights were premiered. Priestley’s foray into independent
management began with his association with J.P. Mitchelhill, who
by the early 1930s owned the Duchess Theatre and produced
plays, a number of which become classics such as the controversial
Children in Uniform (1932, by Christa Winslow), Emlyn
Williams’ Night Must Fall (1935) and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the
Cathedral (1936). It was under Mitchelhill’s management of the
Duchess that Priestley’s Laburnum Grove (1933), Eden End
(1934), Cornelius (1935), Spring Tide (1936) and Time and the
Conways (1937) were produced. According to director Michael
Macowan, Priestley was brought in as producer/backer to their
production company, the London Mask Theatre Company, which
had operated out of the privately owned Westminster Theatre,
after the 1937 season,
I can’t remember the figures now, it may have been two

thousand five hundred or five thousand . . . he said he’d put
up half and we’d find somebody to put up the other half.
(Cotes 1977: 48)
Priestley’s financing of the London Mask Theatre Company (see

Cotes 1977) was interrupted by the war, but after this point,
Mitchelhill became the chair of the company which now included
Thane Parker, Ronald Jeans, Michael Macowan and Priestley.
The Linden Tree (1947) was their first major post-war success,
and the company went on to produce Priestley’s Eden End (in
revival, in 1948), Home is Tomorrow (1948) and Summer Day’s
Dream (1949).
Priestley had initially gone into production in order to escape
what he saw as ‘the worst effects’ of the dominant production
system in London as outlined earlier in this chapter. He enjoyed
‘working on the production side with friends like directors Irene
Hentschel and Basil Dean and Michael Macowan, and on the
managerial side with other colleagues like his agent A.D. Peters,
J.P. Mitchelhill and Thane Parker’ (Priestley 1962: 197). It should
also be pointed out that as a shrewd businessman, he made money
from this venture: his percentage of production profits could be
added to the normal author’s fee. Thus his standard share of gross
weekly box office takings for The Linden Tree was 10 per cent
or 7.5 per cent if takings were less than £1000 and 5 per cent if
they were under £800. His royalties were limited to £5000, with
any owing after this to be reinvested in the London Mask Theatre
Company.6
On other productions, while one-third of the profits would go
to the theatre, two-thirds might go to Priestley as the ‘backer’.
Thus, with a production such as Laburnum Grove (1933),
running costs were relatively low at about £620 per week, while
takings, over the production run, remained fairly constant. At an
average profit of around £250 plus per week (worth around
£11,575 in today’s currency minus the 33.3 per cent Enter-
tainments Tax levy), Priestley stood to make a substantial amount
in addition to the offer of $5000 by Paramount [film] Productions
for a film treatment or adaptation in 1936.7 A good businessman,
Priestley was exceptional in his willingness to actively reinvest
money in theatre.
In his 1962 autobiography Margin Released, which contains
the most about his theatre work, he pointed to the fact that G.B.
Shaw ‘did not approve’ of his production company which, it
should be stressed, produced plays by other writers as well as his
own.
At the time Shaw was declaring that any manager who revived
his plays at cheap prices would make a fortune. He had only
to make a telephone call or two and then find his cheque-book
to begin testing the truth of this assertion, but he never did.
He told me . . . that management would ruin me; it was a
short cut to bankruptcy. He was quite wrong.
Priestley’s business sense revealed a real understanding of the
complexities of the economics of production and of the desira-
bility of artistic control. Just as his initial collaboration with
Mitchelhill had helped to solidify his reputation as a playwright
(see Cotes 1977), 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.
This was in the Thirties, when we could produce Laburnum

Grove, or Eden End or Time and The Conways for about
£800, and the weekly running costs – the ‘get out’ or ‘nut’
were around the same figure, theatre and all. The profits . . .
were never gigantic . . . I was never a showman . . . I prefer
the legitimate stage to be quiet, solid, bourgeois. That Great
Theatre . . . would be . . . an author’s theatre.
Priestley’s time of hands-on production management ended

around the end of the 1940s, but his business acumen continued.
Here, we have to remember that Priestley’s plays have continued
to be produced all over the world, with often more than one
production of any one play running at any one time; the example
of eight productions of Eden End running in professional and
amateur theatres in England during September of 1972 is a case
in point.8 Priestley engaged with playwriting as a profession in
an active manner, from a creative, practical and business point
of view.
Practice: the playwright

There is . . . a bad tradition in the commercial English-
speaking Theatre . . . the author is some poor little chap,
creeping in and out of rehearsals, waiting to be noticed, who
has put together a lot of stuff that the management, the
producer, the players, out of their experience and superior
knowledge, might be able to shape into something like a play
...
The Theatre that handles him in this fashion cannot be
taken seriously in any account of dramatic art: it is in the
entertainment industry and nothing more.
Priestley had much to offer in the way of an analysis of the craft

of playwriting. 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. . . . Assume that the
drama of debate is Shaw’s copyright, so don’t have people
sitting around discussing the atom bomb, unless one of them
has an atom bomb and proposes to use it. 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
. . . Brecht . . . wanted to remove the drama from private life,
give it an historical sweep, make it suggest the fate of whole
classes . . . which sacrifices nearly everything I want in a
playhouse. 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.
(Priestley 1957: 29–30)
Priestley clearly believed in a ‘playwright’s theatre’, but for him

the playwright was part of a creative community, part of a team.
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
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 . . . in the English-
speaking Theatre you are compelled to exist in an over-heated
atmosphere of dazzling successes and shameful flops, you are
a wonder man in October, a pretentious clown in March, you
are in, you are out. . . . 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.
(Priestley 1962: 196–7)
Although Priestley engaged with this ‘business’, he genuinely did

so in order to create real opportunities for other writers to have
their work produced in a setting they were unlikely to experience
in the commercialised sectors of the industry. He wanted play-
wrights to be allowed ‘to experiment, to take a chance. After all
it is not easy to write a good play. The Theatre as a vital modern
institution cannot exist without a supply of good new plays’ (New
York Times, 16 December 1934, quoted in Priestley 2005: 27)
Practice: the critics and critical

reception
Mid-twentieth century theatre critics – usually men and often
educated at Oxford or Cambridge – held sway over the theatre
during the period in which Priestley was actively playwriting.
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 1950s, considered
themselves to be full-time critics, attending the openings of new
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. Walter Macqueen-Pope, theatre publicist,
manager and self-styled theatre historian whose professional life
spanned more than fifty years, felt that as the century moved on,
audiences became more concerned with ‘celebrity’ spotting and
the press critics played into this (Macqueen-Pope 1959: 33–6).
Although an overgeneralised analysis, it contains a strong element
of truth. The theatre provided an opportunity to participate in a
culture of display, which often had little to do with ‘art’ and more
to do with ‘fashion’ and the fashionable. That audiences became
somehow less sophisticated in their tastes is questioned by others
(see Bason 1931), but the circulation of celebrity gossip and the
appeal of theatre as a place of glamour, where ‘stars’ could be
seen in the flesh as opposed to in celluloid only, was seen by
Priestley to have had a negative impact both on theatre – which
should be based on ensemble playing – and playwriting as a
profession. 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. I respect the dramatic critic who writes about a play
as if it were a private performance for himself, who never
mentions box offices, who sees the thing purely as a work of
art and not as a social event and a financial enterprise. 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. . . . It is a pity that critics are for ever
condemned to visit theatres on first nights and on no other
nights. If they did . . . they would come to understand the
differences between audiences who had been bamboozled in
by showmanship and publicity . . . and audiences who were
really and actively playgoing, eager, excited. . . . Theatre is
battling against horribly heavy odds. . . . Keep right out, or
join in Mr Critic, but do not interfere on the wrong side.
(Spectator, 19 April 1935,
quoted in Priestley 2005: 125–6)
As far as Priestley was concerned, the ‘opinion of any fairly

intelligent actor or actress is far sounder than that of most of these
[university] learned critics’ (Priestley 1957: 67). Other critics,
whose influence on box office takings was discernible, were felt
by Priestley to lack any willingness to engage with a need to, ‘raise
the standard of production and acting’. For Priestley this involved
reviewing plays as theatre not as literature, and in terms of ‘Social
Content, Experiment, and Higher Standard’. He noted that a ‘few
of the older critics, not unappreciative of both Social Content and
Higher Standard, always fall down on Experiment . . . they forget
that the naturalistic play that they admire was itself once an
experiment, the challenge of an advanced Theatre’ (Theatre
Newsletter, December 1948, quoted in Priestley 2005: 127–8).
Priestley was not constantly in combat with critics; some, such as
Ivor Brown and James Agate, were counted among his friends.
But he clearly believed that they had a duty to the theatre as an
art form which went beyond the partisan remit of their particular
employers, he wanted sound objective criticism within a frame-
work in which he knew that ‘dramatic criticism . . . does not base
its judgements on any generally accepted critical standards’
(Priestley 1957: 18–19).
Often criticised for being ‘populist’ at the same time as being
criticised for being too obscure, some critics did not like Priestley’s
more socially conscious plays like They Came to a City (1943),
wondering why he did not stick to the successful comic formula
of Laburnum Grove (1933) or When We Are Married (1938),
plays which reveal a ‘northern’ humour for which Priestley was
famous. Agate notes Priestley’s belief that a playwright ‘should
not be content to fill old forms with new matter but discover or
invent new forms’ (Agate 1948: 166) but disliked his more
experimental work such as They Came to a City (1943), feel-
ing that it appealed only to ‘young people devoid of dramatic
perception’, or Johnson Over Jordan (1939) which he felt to be
experimental in form but not content (Agate 1946: 78–9).
Priestley condemned Agate and his colleagues for doing little to
change the theatre industry, pointing out that when he and Ronald
Jeans subsidised the Westminster Theatre just before the Second
World War, ‘just to give London some intelligent productions at
easy prices’, Agate’s attitude was ‘grudging and querulous’. Agate
and his colleagues played into a theatre system whereby a
successful play might be given only a few days ‘get-out’ notice
because the theatre owners had something on ‘standby’ out of
which they thought they could make more money (Priestley
1947a: 185–6). Priestley wanted critics to help improve working
and production conditions for playwrights, not spend their time
criticising those like himself for ‘magnificent sermonising’ or
writing ‘sociologically’ (Agate 1946: 78–9).
That Priestley engaged so actively and at times formidably with
the critics was unusual for a playwright of his generation: one
might suggest that he took up the cause where G.B. Shaw left off.
To an extent he could do this because his success had given him
financial stability, but this success had only come about as a result
of the fact that he was able to tune in to what it was that potential
audiences were looking for. 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. Priestley
did not see himself as writing plays with a ‘message’; as he reminds
us, ‘it would never occur to me to wrap up a message in a hundred
pages of a play script’ as this is not the ‘business of theatre’
(Theatre Newsletter, 1948, quoted in Priestley 2005: 128).
Although his plays can be grouped in terms of their focus on
particular social, political or philosophical issues, the groupings
do not necessarily represent ‘phases’ in his playwriting.
Thus, from the mid to late 1930s his processing of theories of
time are played out in Time and the Conways (1937) and I Have
Been Here Before (1937) but these reverberate in plays from the
1940s as well. Similarly the critique of capitalism, present in a
comedy like Bees on the Boat Deck (1936) and Cornelius (1940),
is also prevalent in An Inspector Calls (1946), Home is Tomorrow
(1948) and Summer Day’s Dream (1949). Priestley did not see
himself as a ‘political’ playwright but political thinking drives his
playwriting: equally, his ability to write comic drama lies at the
heart of many of his plays. In light of this, his ‘criticism of the
critics’, as it were, was shaped by his belief that a playwright’s
oeuvre should be allowed to express an ever changing commit-
ment to an art form. 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: if one management found success with a certain type
of play, another management would want to ape that success by
seeking to produce a play which it understood to capitalise on a
similar formula. Priestley wanted a ‘serious’ theatre which allowed
for intelligent audiences and intelligent but entertaining plays.
That he found such continual success over an initial period of
more than thirty years, despite the ‘nightmare obstacle course’
that the theatre industry represented, implies that his vision of
what theatre culture might be, has been shared by audiences of a
number of generations, both in Europe and North America.
Part II
Key plays
3 The family, gender
and sexual relations
A number of critics have tried to frame Priestley’s playwriting into

phases based either on chronology (pre-war, wartime and post-
war) or on areas of thematic focus – time, socialism and the post-
war world (Klein 1988: 245). 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 more he was
involved in production and management the more aesthetic
demands he made on the medium. The staging of plays from the
early 1930s is far less complex than those from the late 1930s and
early 1940s such as Johnson Over Jordan (see Chapter 8) and
They Came to a City (1943) for example (see Chapter 5).
However we choose to frame his plays, DeVitis and Kalson (1980)
rightly point out that while Priestley became the ‘disillusioned
optimist’ as he matured, he never lost sight of a Jungian emphasis
on man’s goodness and the ‘concept of the oneness of all men’.
This oneness places man as ‘a member of a charmed or magic
circle’: at the centre of the circle is the family and as his career
progresses Priestley widens the circle to embrace the ‘nation as
family’ and the ‘world as family’ (DeVitis and Kalson 1980: 125).
Such an analysis to some extent oversimplifies Priestley’s reading
and appropriation of Jung, but it does provide an interesting
framework which pinpoints the importance of the concept and
actuality of the family as a social and socialising unit in his plays.
62 Key plays
The idea of the family, as a domestic and social unit, both
nuclear/extended and biological/sociological, lies at the heart of
a great number of Priestley’s plays. He is not atypical in this: many
other playwrights of the 1930s and 1940s used representations
and analyses of the family and changing gender roles within it, as
a way of reflecting on social and political events and transitions
– this is particularly so in the case of the numerous women
playwrights of the era in which Priestley was working in the
theatre (see Gale 1996, 2000) but is also the case for a number
of male playwrights traditionally viewed as conservative, such as
Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward. Historically, the family
as a social unit had undergone a significant transformation during
the first fifty years of the twentieth century, not only because of
the two world wars in which whole generations of men had died,
but also because of increases in social mobility and leisure time
and a significant increase in the levels of professionalisation
among lower-middle and middle-class women. 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. Women were often
required to work in traditionally ‘male’ vocations during each of
the two world wars and, although legislation and social theory
aimed to reverse the position after each, by the 1950s middle-class
women were a strong component of the workforce. With the
newly acquired partial franchise in 1918 and the full vote in 1928,
women had growing social power as voting citizens, despite the
various Married Women’s Laws which prohibited them working
in certain professions once married (see Lewis 1984).
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. In an essay published in the early
1920s, ‘In Praise of the Normal Woman’, he berated the
generation of ‘elderly men’ who were ‘secretly terrified’ by the
‘new type of woman’:
the emancipated woman, who has put down her fancy-work,
left home, received a man’s education, taken a man’s position
in the world, and partly adopted masculine habits.
The family, gender and sexual relations 63
Priestley himself, in a strange twist of logic, did not fear such
women because, for him, they operated on the same basis as men
and so did not have the power to question or criticise ‘male’
behaviour – they were masculinised. He suggested that the
‘ordinary woman’
usually possesses something that her more ‘advanced’ sister

plainly lacks, and that is common sense; and a measure of
feminine commonsense is fatal to pretentious and designing
males. . . . 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.
Underpinning his somewhat perverse analysis is a belief that

the imitation of power structures does not undermine the power
structures themselves. 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 opposi-
tions, the dynamics and manifestations of which could be easily
formulated. His own early oversimplified divisions of gendered
behaviour are not borne out in his plays where the feminine and
the masculine are made more complex and interwoven. 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. Placed in
cultural context, there were a number of feminists who believed
that the emancipation of women should include access to and
control of the power structures, but that this should not neces-
sitate the removal, rather the integration, of the ‘feminine’ in such
systems of power. The cultural anxiety around the idea of a
‘petticoat government’ after women were given the full franchise
was virulent, and Priestley’s early essay tries to identify some of
64 Key plays
the elements of this anxiety without actually acknowledging that
it is doing so. His simple unravelling of a complex social issue
may seem old fashioned to a contemporary audience nowadays,
but it was radical in its time because of his underlying belief that
the sexes were ‘different but equal’: such an analysis reverberates
in the arguments around women’s emancipation during the
second wave of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s.
It is important to unpick some of Priestley’s early ideas on
gender, because questions around gender are central to many of
his ‘family’ plays and gendered behaviour as a social construct is
an issue to which he returns on numerous occasions. 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. His mother died when he was young, his first wife died
when he was in his early thirties, his second wife spent the war
years setting up and managing homes for evacuated children,1 and
he had five children of his own and two through marriages to
divorced women. Often presented as a womaniser (see Brome
1988), Priestley’s autobiographical writing pays witness to the
importance which the family, as a supportive domestic unit, held
in his professional as well as personal life. 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. While his first play, the adaptation of The Good
Companions (see Chapter 6), creates a ‘virtual’ family – the
performance troupe function as an extended family unit but one
which has chosen its members – the second Dangerous Corner
(1932) unpicks comfortable middle-class complacency and shows
the traditional family as both dysfunctional and in crisis.
The family in a state of disintegration
from Dangerous Corner (1932) to The
Glass Cage (1957)
Dangerous Corner (1932)

Dangerous Corner has become one of Priestley’s most performed
plays, although as with a number of his works, it was not well
received by the critics on original production. A revised text,
which missed out the radio device at the beginning of the play and
reformulated some of the language to suit an American audience,
premiered in New York five months after the London production
and ran for over 1000 performances. Thus, while his most
successful play on Broadway during this period, the London
production ran for just 150 performances at the Lyric in London
in 1932. 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). Pre-publicity for the London
production framed it as ‘a study in a satirical vein of the post-War
generation’,2 while the critics who responded positively to the
production framed it more specifically in terms of Priestley’s
critique of the ‘tedious, teasing suburbanity’ of the Caplan family
at the centre of the play.3 One reviewer recognised the way in
which Priestley had taken the then current ‘drawing room’,
middle-class family play and turned it upside down.
Mr Priestley has looked upon the theatrical drawing-room

and has been, with good reason, a little bored by it. The stuff
of drama, he says by implication, is in men’s hands; there is
always, beneath their reticences, a clash of their secret
knowledge and suspicions, of their hatreds and loves of one
another, and this clash, existing though none perceives it, is
no less dramatic because, in life it is repressed and finds no
outlet in action. His aim is to make this clash audible, to
discover a drawing-room’s soul.4
66 Key plays
Figure 2 Dangerous Corner, Lyric Theatre, London, 1932.
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. Discussion ensues about the
radio play which has just finished, when the family men and their
guest come to join the women. Conversation then begins to focus
on a cigarette box which Olwen Peel, an honorary family member
who has worked for the family firm for some years, claims to have
seen before. Freda Caplan, wife of Robert – now the family
patriarch – suggests that Olwen can’t have seen the box before as
it was a gift from her to the diseased Martin Caplan – Robert’s
brother – given to him on the day he committed suicide. 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.
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. Freda Caplan had been having an
affair with Martin; her brother Gordon had also, it is implied, been
in love with Martin, who had exploited his affections; Robert,
Freda’s husband and Martin’s brother, had been in love with Betty,
Gordon’s wife; she in turn had been having an illicit affair with
Stanton, whose affiliations with the family business had been
substantial and long-lived; finally Olwen, desperately in love with
Robert, had been the object of Stanton’s secret affections. 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. Equally, each
of the unravellings of emotional truths are linked to the characters’
relationship to Martin, who as the ‘attractive and quixotic’ brother
is drawn in stark contrast to the upright and ‘proper’ Robert
(Hughes 1958: 131).
Martin is assumed to have stolen money from the family firm
and this, it is believed, is the reason behind his decision to take
his own life. What is revealed, as an echo of Freud, is that Martin’s
id rather than his ego or super ego, was ruling his life and that
unlike his brother, he did not repress his sexuality nor did he try
to quash his own drug addiction. Happy to be in receipt of the
devotion of both his brother’s wife and her own brother, Martin
felt far from guilty about any of his selfish actions. Stanton in
actuality stole the money and when this fact was not discovered
during the court inquest after Martin’s death, he was content to
keep quiet about it. Gordon, devoted to Martin’s Apollonian
nature, was one of the key witnesses at the hearing while others
in the family absented themselves. As the play draws to a close
and each has taken the ‘dangerous corner’ and revealed their own
‘truth’ – their moral complicity in Martin’s death – Olwen speaks
up and turns out to be the last of all of them to have seen Martin
alive.
68 Key plays
OLWEN: . . . He saw himself as some sort of Pan. . . . He
thought of me . . . as a priggish spinster . . . and kept
telling me that my dislike of him showed that I was trying
to repress a great fascination he had for me . . . I’d never
lived, never would live . . . 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 . . . he was in that excited abnormal state . . .
then he tried to show me some beastly foul drawing he
has – horrible obscene things . . . then he was telling me
to take my clothes off . . . he stood between me and the
door.
(Priestley 2001a: 78–9)
Martin’s attempted rape of Olwen failed because the revolver he

was wielding got turned against him in the struggle, and went off
by mistake. When the family find out what happened, they do not
turn on Olwen but sympathise with her. It is Stanton who receives
their wrath because of his theft of family money and his theft and
exploitation of Betty’s affections. Robert, who has forced out the
truth, now finds he has lost the comfort of illusion: when told by
Olwen that he will have to learn to live without illusions, he
replies:
ROBERT: . . . Can’t be done. Not for us. We started life too

early for that, possibly now they are breeding people who
can live without illusions. . . . But I can’t do it. I’ve lived
among illusions. . . . They’ve given me hope and courage
. . . I suppose we ought to get all that from faith in life.
But I haven’t got any. No religion or anything. . . . But it
didn’t look too bad. I’d my little illusions . . . we are not
living in the same world now. Everything’s gone.
As the family clash and blame one another, Robert disappears,

the stage goes to blackout and a shot is heard. When the lights
come up the scene is the same as at the beginning of the play and
the women are listening to the radio: the dialogue then runs to
almost exactly the same pattern as during the opening of Act I
until the mention of the cigarette box, but nobody questions
Olwen about having seen it before and the lights fade as they all
carry on chatting and listening to the same play, aptly named, as
at the opening of Act I, The Sleeping Dog, on 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. He employs a theatrical device through which we now see the
Caplans and their associates in a different light, although we are
not sure that anything we have witnessed has ‘really’ happened –
were we just watching a staging of a radio play? 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. Robert has instigated the deconstruction
of the family, like the peeling of an onion, and at its centre lies
the ‘corrupted’ Martin, Robert’s alter ego, a man who refused to
confine himself to the repressive qualities of middle-class family
values and traditions. Miss Mockridge’s ‘charmed circle’, as she
describes the group at the beginning of the play, is broken, the
‘snug little group’ has been disbanded. Not even Priestley’s switch
back to the pre-confessional moments of the play can reverse the
fact that the foundations on which the family had built its identity,
have been severely undermined. 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 estab-
lished. 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 2003). The fact of his
lack of physical presence in the play may have dampened the
censor’s desire to ban the play: the censor’s report suggests that
70 Key plays
Martin’s bisexuality was not considered to be ‘threatening’. The
reader’s report for the censor’s office states that there was ‘nothing
in the revelations to trouble us’, that the play contained ‘the
suggestion of sentimental homosexuality’ which was ‘only vague
and non-physical’.5 For Alan Sinfield (1999: 170), Martin repre-
sents the infiltration ‘by queerness’ of a bourgeois family group,
yet it might be said that Priestley is offering us more than this.
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:
he is an individualist uninterested in continuing family traditions
and his presence demands that we review the nature of inclusivity
and exclusivity within the family unit.
A number of reviews of the play mention the fact that Priestley
sets out to demolish ‘the houses of illusion’ which the Caplans and
the bourgeois family unit they represent live within.6 Equally they
criticise his desire to probe into family politics – ‘a husband who
insists on uncovering the cesspool would have desisted at the first
hint of a bad smell’7 – and allow the ghosts of the past to haunt,
but this is clearly deliberate on Priestley’s part. Many of the critics
also bemoaned the fact that the characters were not ‘likeable’, and
that this somehow undermined the power of the play. But just as
more recent productions, such as Laurie Sansom’s for the West
Yorkshire Playhouse/Garrick Theatre in 2001, present the Caplans
and their associates as a ‘snug little group’ of ‘beautiful young
people’, so Priestley was trying to delve beneath the surface of the
seemingly untouchable upper-middle-class family unit of the 1930s
(see Laurie Sansom in Priestley 2001: 12).
The Glass Cage (1957)

Religious bigotry, financial greed and exclusivity lie at the root
of the undoing of the McBane family in Priestley’s late play The
Glass Cage (1957), which originally ran for a short period at the
Piccadilly Theatre in London’s West End.8 The setting is Canada,
during the Edwardian era in 1906. Far removed from the 1950s
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 unit and the disintegration of the foundations which
serve as its basis as a central focal point for dramatic action.
Writing in the context of the emergence of a post-colonial, post-
nuclear and post-war Britain, the play is an extraordinarily
modern piece steeped in philosophical questioning and displays
a virile ability on Priestley’s part to deconstruct the dynamics of
religious hypocrisy, generational and cultural difference. 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 1950s 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. David’s religious leanings are used to justify his
hardline politics on clean living and godly thinking and behaviour:
he is the head of a business empire and the head of a family unit
which lies at the centre of the community in which he resides. 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. Equally, David is
clear that the fact that their mother was ‘a wild girl’ from ‘Thunder
Bay country – part Indian’ (that is to say, Native American) locates
them as ‘other’, as outsiders (Priestley 2003b: 200). 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. As he says, ‘David a widower, with only little Elspie here.
72 Key plays
And Robert McBane left you a childless widow, Mildred. And
Malcolm here is not even married’ (Priestley 2003b: 200). While
Mildred claims that David went to a great deal of trouble to find
Charlie’s children, who were dispersed all over the country, she
is also unwilling to be a welcoming hostess during their stay. She
simply does not want them inside the family home. The position
of overt hostility is amplified early on by Elspie, who again
strongly positions them as ‘other’ to her everyday experience of
the family. 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. Really strange,
not just people I don’t know. There weren’t any thoughts or
feelings I could understand behind their eyes . . . All three
have the same sort of eyes – they just look at you.
David McBane is keen to point out that the three outsiders are
different but that they should be treated with kindness and respect.
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.
Douglas McBane, the oldest of Charlie’s children, undermines
David’s assumption that all three of his brother’s offspring are
stupid as well as ‘heathen’, and does his own detailed research
into the workings of the family history and the legality of the
business and its ownership. The discovery that he and his family
have built their community and business profile through dis-
honesty shocks David and, as the play draws to a close, his posi-
tion as patriarch and giver of unchallengeable orders has been
undermined. John Harvey and Elspie’s lives have been completely
changed through their interaction with the outsiders, Malcolm
and Mildred’s hypocrisy has been exposed, and David has trans-
formed into a man who is unsure about his own heritage and the
solidity of his belief system.
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:
JEAN: Our mother believed you’d all got rid of our father –
. . . because he married her. And of course that seemed
as wicked and terrible to us as it did to her . . . she slaved
to bring us up properly – but she let us grow up in a cage
. . . we could see the world stretching before us – through
the glass bars – but we couldn’t go out to accept it.
By the end of the play Jean realises that in exposing the truth she
and her brothers have a choice: she suggests that they move
forward and allow themselves to be released from the ‘glass cage’,
from which they have experienced the world thus far. 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. Priestley is clear however, that the family unit cannot
function without the exposé of fault-lines in the ideology which
has hitherto held it together. The embracing of forgiveness as a
way forward for Jean and her brothers serves to present their
future as open, and therefore ‘uncaged’. 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.
74 Key plays
Tom Priestley has suggested that The Glass Cage was unusual
in its overt depiction of evil but that in Elspie and Jean there are
echoes of the strong young women Priestley created in earlier plays
(see Priestley 2003b: 11). 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.
Prodigal daughters: Eden End (1934),

Time and the Conways (1937) and The
Linden Tree (1947)
John Stokes has suggested that the figure of the prodigal, recurrent
in European drama, is ‘at once profoundly unfair and deeply
satisfying’ (Stokes 1999: 26). Certainly the figure of the prodigal
son often creates disturbance within the family unit and
reconciliation, forgiveness and an unravelling of the tightly bound
family unit often follows his appearance. Stokes (1999: 31) points
to the proliferation of prodigal daughters and especially the fact
that Stella in Eden End9 was viewed by Priestley as ‘a prodigal
daughter as well as an actress’.
Eden End (1934)

Stella’s transgressive career choice as an actress serves to
emphasise the significance of her withdrawal from the expec-
tations of the traditional gender roles which her middle-class
Edwardian family background would have created for her: yet
Stella’s escape from the family did not happen because of any
radical agenda on her part. In taking us back in time to the
Edwardian pre-war years, Priestley sets up an expectation of a
comfortable and trouble-free, middle-class existence, and this is
the life that Stella, after years of touring with second and third
rate theatre companies as far afield as Australia, imagines she is
returning to. But her visions of an easy and care-free home life are
based on childhood memories and the fantasy of a ‘happy’ middle-
class family. Her return to Eden End finds her father, Dr Kirby,
at the end of his career and clear that he wished he had made
braver choices and challenged social conventions as his daughter
has done.
You were right Stella, to cut and run when you did. . . . I wish
now that I’d had the same sort of courage.
Clearly his favourite, Kirby finds justifications for Stella having

run away and neglecting to return on the death her mother six
years previously. 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. Stella’s sister Lilian, barely a
teenager when Stella left, is the one who stayed at home and
looked after her ailing mother, her mourning father and Geoffrey
Farrant, the man whose heart was broken when Stella left. 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. . . . Do you know what
I’d have rather done than anything else in the world? I’d
rather have gone with Captain Scott to the South Pole.
Lilian’s aspirations to step outside of her traditional female role

were undermined by her sister who, according to Lilian, ran away
without thinking about the consequences and then returned when
she felt her life had become a mess. Lilian’s response is typical of
the sibling who has had to stay at home while the prodigal goes
out into the world, and because she is female, her duty to the
family has involved taking over the domestic role of the ‘wife’.
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: ‘And just when they had come to depend on
you again, you’d run away . . . there’s no responsibility in you’
(Priestley 2001b: 93).
Through the battle between the two sisters Priestley raises
questions about the structure and function of the family and
specifically of women’s roles within it. All the men are weak,
naive, full of regret or simply foolish – Dr Kirby’s disappointment
at his life’s achievements; Stella’s errant husband Charles’s acting
career ruined by his alcoholism and battered ego; her brother’s
ridiculous attempts to find a sexual partner and Geoffrey Farrant’s
hopeless longing for Stella as he once knew her. The women, in
contrast, pose philosophical questions around issues of choice,
loss and duty. Gareth Lloyd Evans notes the parallel between Eden
End and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (Evans 1964: 82),
pointing to the sense of collapse and disintegration inherent in
both plays. But he also feels that by returning to 1912 as a setting,
the play loses impact over time: that the distance between the
original audiences’ relationship to the period before the First
World and our own, necessitates nostalgia rather than anything
more sharply political in essence. This reading, however, removes
the possibility of more sophisticated analysis. When Kirby refers
to the ‘muddle’ they are living in the 1910s and suggests that
future generations in the 1930s won’t understand the nature of
that ‘muddle’, Priestley is, as Stokes suggests, nudging the
audience ‘towards the recognition that, in truth, “the muddle”
has only deepened’ (Stokes 1999: 32). 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 1930s.
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.
Time and the Conways (1937)

In Time and the Conways, a play which is more usually grouped
with Priestley’s ‘time’ plays (see Chapter 4), the middle-class
family is shown to be equally in disarray. A play in which Priestley
tried to ‘evoke a tender intimate atmosphere of family life’, it is
also one in which the texture of the family as a working unit is
undermined by the very force that is meant to hold it together
(Priestley 1941a: 119). The Acts II and II of Time and the
Conways are famously reversed so that, while the play begins in
the ‘present’ moment of 1919 just after the end of the First World
War, Act II takes us forward in time to 1937, the present moment
for the original audience. Act III returns us to the temporal
moment at the end of Act I, where Kay, waking from sleep, puts
the veracity of the action in Act II into doubt – we are never sure
if what we have seen in Act II is her dream or a playing out of the
‘real’ future.
Because of the reversal of time however, what we witness is
both a vision of the Conways’ future and a time contemporary to
the audience. Here the Conways have lost the financial basis which
supports the family unit as Mrs Conway’s snobbery and naivety
have led to poor investment decisions, in an economic climate
where no such mistakes could be tolerated: she has not taken the
financial advice of those she considers to be her social inferiors.
The family members have been called to the Conway home to
discuss family finances and we learn of their fates: Carol has died,
Robin, an alcoholic and unable to find himself any permanent
employment, has left his wife and children to fend for themselves,
and Alan, the apple of his father’s eye, has, according to his
mother, ‘no prospects, no ambition, no self-respect’ (Priestley
1994: 58). On the death of the Conway patriarch during the late
1910s, 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. Mrs Conway refused to give Madge money
to buy into a partnership of a school, preferring instead to provide
financial support to her errant son Robin, ‘her own sort, and a
great comfort’ (Priestley 1994: 58). Priestley pits one generation
of women against another and uses this as a filter through which
we see tradition subverted by progress in terms of gender roles
within the family. The two ‘prodigal daughters’ Kay and Madge
78 Key plays
are both professional women but they are also living in the ‘real’
world: Kay would like to write novels but has to work as a
journalist in order to survive, and Madge’s work as a teacher
reflects her strong belief in the power and necessity of education.
Kay’s approach to the disaster which has befallen the family since
Act I is equally critical but somewhat more sanguine and less
aggressive than her elder sister’s. Madge accuses her mother of
neglect both of the family unit and of the individuals within it.
MADGE: But it’s monstrous. 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.
Mrs Conway suggests that her daughter hasn’t ‘the least idea what
a woman’s real life is like’ (Priestley 1994: 50) but Priestley is clear
that the life Mrs Conway has led is one of careless privilege.
Madge notes that like many others of her own generation she had
aspirations and hopes after the First World War, ‘When I still
thought we could suddenly make everything better for everybody.
Socialism! Peace! Universal Brotherhood!’ But these aspirations
were crushed by a mother who did not wish her daughter to have
either professional or romantic ambitions, as Madge says: ‘A seed
is easily destroyed, but it might have grown into an oak tree’
(Priestley 1994: 57). Neither of the two ‘prodigal’ daughters have
become mothers and Priestley steers us towards thinking that Mrs
Conway’s version of motherhood – jealous, possessive, divisive
and embedded in the fantasy of middle-class Edwardian grandeur
– is no longer appropriate. As Lynne Walker pointed out in a
review of a production of the play at the Royal Exchange theatre
in Manchester, England, the game of charades played so
enthusiastically and so exclusively by the family at the beginning
of the play becomes a motif for the ‘charade’ of ‘happy families’.10
Priestley suggests that the social and economic imperative of the
modern family unit is such that it needs to look outward to the
world at large, rather than inward to its own closed and dysfunc-
tional manifestations.
The Linden Tree (1947)

Just as Time and the Conways sees the return to the family home
of two daughters who, although not exactly ‘prodigal’ in the same
way as Stella in Eden End, have overt traces of prodigality, so too
in The Linden Tree Priestley creates two returning daughters in
Jean and Marion.11 The sisters, now busy professional women,
come back to the family home on the occasion of their father’s
sixty-fifth birthday: they have been called back by their mother
who wants Professor Linden to retire against his will (see Chapter
5). What is interesting here is that Jean and Marion represent two
extremes of the ideological spectrum. Marion has married into
the French aristocracy and has become besotted with a social
system based on clear distinctions between the classes and on the
traditions of the ‘Catholic aristocratic old world’ (Priestley 1994:
230). 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. For Marion, religion
and the ‘old civilised tradition’ have helped her find an emotional
equilibrium but as Professor Linden points out, religion has done
little to benefit millions living elsewhere in the world. As far as
he is concerned, she ‘lives a very pleasant life’, but not one which
can ‘solve a single major human problem’ (Priestley 1994: 243).
For Jean the ‘peace of mind’ which Marion has found in religion
can also be found in the bottles of pills in her hospital. Religion
is an escape and the ‘best minds have always been fighting the
churches tooth and nail. Just as they are today’ (Priestley 1994:
268). She refers to love and romance as an ‘old custom’:
And I hate all the idiotic feminine fusses and tantrums . . .

what’s the use of asking for a disciplined scientific society if
I can’t even discipline myself – a woman with a good scientific
training.
80 Key plays
Neither Marion’s religion nor Jean’s scientific disregard for the
individual are shown as providing a way forward for Linden or
for the world at large. Professor Linden’s son Rex, who fought in
the war and then played the money markets to great success,
provides the route out of the life of a provincial university wife
for Mrs Linden. Rex’s attitude is cavalier, he calls it living by ‘Spiv
philosophy’ – capitalising on the existence of a ‘black market
economy’ – and unlike his father who does not wish to stop
working, Rex believes that ‘only mugs work’ and that money
provides a ‘high wall or two and a little civilised amusement’
(Priestley 1994: 251). As Mrs Linden decides that after years of
marriage she will not wait for her husband to retire but will
instead go to live in her son’s lavish mansion, so the Linden family
is effectively dissolved. The individualistic wins out over the
communal and the ideological possibilities offered by either
Marion or Jean are negated by Rex’s belief that, with the
possibility of another war and nuclear threat, individualism and
the seeking of immediate gratification is the best option.
Patriarchy in crisis? The Linden Tree

(1947), Johnson Over Jordan (1939),
Laburnum Grove (1933)
For Hughes, The Linden Tree centres on Priestley’s ‘concern for
the anxieties of individuals trying to drop anchor in the rough
seas of a changing society’ (Hughes 1958: 194). But Priestley’s
context for the individual is the family: the aperture provided by
the family as a social unit, allows comment on the relationship
between the individual and the social and political world in which
they are located. 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.
Although not the only text which shows patriarchy in crisis and
thus the traditional operation of the family under threat, embedded
in The Linden Tree – with the threatened removal of the status
provided by Professor Linden’s job – is the link between patriarchy,
employment and power structures within the family unit.
Linden’s family has respected and benefited from his dedication
to all things educational. 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. No
longer wanting to live what she has experienced as the isolation
of life in a provincial university town, Mrs Linden initiates the
deconstruction of Professor Linden’s role as patriarch: if he has
no job, or the limited status the university is prepared to grant
him, and if she removes herself from the family home and takes
up the option of a carefree life offered to her by her son, then
Linden no longer has an on-site family to oversee. Rather, he is
left to battle with the university over the nature of his future
employment, keep watch over their teenage daughter and be
‘looked after’ by Mrs Cotton, the struggling housekeeper. 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.
Husband and father of two, Robert Johnson in Johnson Over
Jordan (see Chapter 8) is similarly removed from his family. 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.
Removed from his role as patriarch, he is somehow outside of
time and has the privileged opportunity to witness his own
family’s responses to him as they go through the early stages of
their mourning process after he has died. 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. His journey
as a patriarch encompasses a ‘return to the self’, removed from a
role within a social group back towards some attempt to under-
stand his own individuality. We don’t see how his role as patriarch
has shaped his family, but we see how it has shaped his own life.
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. Thus in Dangerous
Corner, Robert Caplan sees himself as carrying forward the family
business very much on the same terms in which it was originally
82 Key plays
set up and operated by his father, but is stopped from doing so
by the rupture which Martin’s death, and the ensuing revelations
about his life, reveal. Whereas in Time and the Conways, the
father figure, again absent, has created an economic basis for the
family but this is allowed to slowly disintegrate through mis-
management. 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. Just as Johnson is eventually able to unpick
the fibres of his own existence through death and a journey to
some sort of afterlife, so too Priestley invites a deconstruction of
the ways in which the family as a collective group functions in a
social and cultural environment in transition, through placing the
patriarch in crisis or simply removing him from the stage.
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. The disjuncture of his belief system with the
ways in which the family business has been run dishonestly, is a
reflection upon the fact that his style as a patriarch is no longer
tenable: he is forced to listen to and act upon the beliefs of the
younger generation.
The patriarch, George Radfern, in Priestley’s hugely popular
1933 play Laburnum Grove,12 was played in the original London
production by Edmund Gwenn, who also played Jess Oakroyd
in the 1933 film of The Good Companions (see Chapter 6). 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. As with many of Priestley’s
other comedies, the play is full of witty twists and caricatures of
the middle class uncovered. Radfern’s brother and sister-in-law
are unwelcome and long-term guests in the family home, waiting
for a hand-out from Radfern’s hard-earned, well-saved money to
give them the financial boost they feel they need to ‘get on in the
world’. Similarly, Radfern’s daughter Elsie is besotted with a man
who wants to borrow money from her father in order that he
might buy into a partnership in a business. When Radfern,
jokingly we believe, suggests that rather than working as an honest
manager and businessman, he has, for some years, been launder-
ing money with his old friend, Joe Fletten, the family are shocked.
The unwelcome guests make a speedy exit and Elsie’s fiancé calls
off their relationship. Mrs Radfern is convinced that her husband
has been fooling them with the suggestion that he is a criminal,
and even an inquisitive visit by an inspector from Scotland Yard
doesn’t convince her otherwise. But Radfern’s money printing
business is no joke at all and the play ends with the family escaping
their suburban existence to go abroad, and enjoy the fruits of
Radfern’s ill-gotten gains.
Here the suburban patriarch, in an environment which Tom
Priestley has aptly proposed parallels the ‘smooth underbelly of
Mike Leigh territory’ (Priestley 2003a: 10), takes his family away
from ‘ordinariness’ and confinement of the nuclear family, but
does so through criminality. What for Priestley was a veiled
criticism of the British monetary system – as he suggests, ‘the
banks appeared to flourish when industry was failing’ (Priestley
2003: 17–18) – Laburnum Grove is a celebration of the middle-
class English eccentric male, well hidden beneath the veneer of
suburbia. The family unit is not dissolved but rather, through the
patriarch’s inventive criminality, is removed from its almost
repressive context.
Comedy, marriage and sexual relations:

When We Are Married (1938), How Are
They at Home? (1944), Ever Since
Paradise (1947) and Mr Kettle and
Mrs Moon (1955)
That Priestley was such an adept writer of comedy has, at times,
been used as a justification for his near ejection from the English
canon of twentieth century literature. Even relatively contem-
porary critics have found it difficult to place his comic writing
alongside the more overtly politically driven works for the stage
(see Innes 1992). Priestley’s comedies – with a few exceptions such
as Bees on the Boat Deck (1936, see Chapter 5), a thinly disguised
farcical snipe at capitalism and its promoters – were among the
84 Key plays
more popular of his plays in production in England. It is, however,
Priestley’s populism which underpins much of the critical dis-
missal of his work (see Chapter 1). 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. With the possible exception of When We
Are Married, in each of these – How Are They at Home?, Ever
Since Paradise and Mr Kettle and Mrs Moon – Priestley investi-
gates, through different narrative frameworks, the nature of
romance, marriage and power relations between the sexes in
sexual partnerships.
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.
But the actual references to sex in the plays mentioned above are
few and far between: sex is presented, through characters like
the hilarious Monica Twigg in Mr Kettle and Mrs Moon,13 as
less important than the fraught but rewarding negotiations of
actual lived relationships between the sexes. While Mr and Kettle
and Mrs Moon turn to each other as they reveal their secret
‘repressed’ everyday selves, Monica is openly defiant of those who
keep dismissing her from her varying places of employment
because she refuses their sexual advances.
MONICA: People think I am a sexy type – that’s how I lose

jobs – but I am not so gone on sex. . . . All these pieces
in women’s mags – they make me mad. All about what
you must do to find him and keep him. ‘Make yourself
fresh and dainty for him’. . . . Why don’t they have a go
at keeping fresh and dainty for us? And what do you get
for it all? . . . four kids, a kitchen full of washing, red
hands an’ flat feet an’ Housewives’ Choice.
Her bright and breezy attitude is appreciated by Kettle, who sees

her as wanting to escape the humdrum, respectable suburban
existence which they both, from different perspectives, share.
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.
In the earlier and better known When We Are Married, the
three couples begin to reassess their marital relationships when
they find out, while celebrating their silver wedding anniversaries,
that in fact they have never been legally married at all. The power
relations within the three different marriages all begin to shift as
each couple wonders both what they might have done had they
never married, and what they might do now that they believe
they are in fact legally ‘single’. Much comedy ensues as the balance
of power within each relationship is transformed: behaviour
tolerated previously is now frowned upon or simply deemed
unacceptable. 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?,
which ran originally for four months in London in 1944. Here
Priestley sets up a number of romantic encounters among a group
of wartime workers all gathered at the home of Lady Farfield,
who has climbed the ranks and been promoted from the factory
floor to a supervisory role. All classes are represented in the house
as they gather for an evening meal, only to be constantly inter-
rupted by the various officers and government officials who have
86 Key plays
been billeted to Lady Farfield’s once ornate country mansion.
While the butler has lost any sense of reality and is convinced that
the house is still fully equipped with the requisite number of
servants, Lady Farfield and her cook, a singer from the Vienna
Opera, manage on wartime rations and a sharing of all resources.
When an old flame, Edward Camyon, is billeted at Farfield Hall
for the evening, he is convinced that Lady Farfield is still one of
those people ‘who can give parties every night, and fling money
away, and keeps rows of servants waiting on them, and generally
behaving like callous idiots’ (Priestley 1949a: 409). Unaware of
the truth as known by all the others, that she has ‘given up her
old privileges. No class distinctions. Democracy with its sleeves
rolled up’ (Priestley 1949a: 430), Camyon attacks her verbally for
her presumed aristocratic ways inappropriate to wartime life.
Offended by his lack of ability to see the reality of her domestic
situation, Lady Farfield creates a charade of wealth and femininity
with the other women and in doing so, exposes his blind
pomposity and arrogance. Once he has realised the reality of the
situation and begged her forgiveness, she points out that while the
men are away at war, the women at home, ‘work for them, pray
for them and think of nothing else, deep down, but the time when
it’ll all be over and they’re all back. And that’s our real life
(Priestley 1949a: 438).
Without the quietly romantic and distinctive class traces of Lady
Farfield, Pauline is strong-willed, ideologically driven, assertive
and sees sexual relationships in purely pragmatic terms. Working
as a land girl she is practical and views relationships in terms of
their functionality: assured that Tony is not the ‘type of officer
who is looking forward to nothing after the war but secretaryship
of a second-rate golf club in a decaying society’, she sweeps him
off his feet. Rather than feeling threatened by her strident persona
or her lack of traditionally feminine charms, Tony sees her as a
‘girl’ who has ‘got everything’ (Priestley 1949a: 436, 437). Thus
Priestley sets up his ‘topical’ comedy as a means of examining
relations between the sexes in a world turned upside-down by
war: and here it is the ‘new’ women, masculinised to some extent
by their circumstances who are endowed with the intelligence to
lead sexual relationships forward. These are the same non-
traditional women who Priestley problematises in the early essay
noted at the beginning of this chapter – but here they are cele-
brated.
Priestley’s Ever Since Paradise, which he subtitled ‘A Discursive
Entertainment chiefly referring to love and marriage’ (Priestley
1949a: 443), is a pure and, according to Christopher Innes, ‘ironic
presentation of the battle of the sexes through Shavian debate’
(Innes 1992: 367). Although comedic, the humour comes from
the interaction of the characters’ rather than from the context in
which they find themselves. Creating what, at the time, were
significant challenges in staging – two couples perform at the side
and front of the stage, two play the piano at the sides and two
‘perform’ the history of their relationship from a stage within the
stage – Ever Since Paradise shows Priestley in experimental mood.
Figure 3 Ever Since Paradise, New Theatre, London, 1947.

Photograph: Angus McBean. Courtesy of the Mander and
Mitchenson Theatre Collection.
88 Key plays
As Philip and Joyce bicker about each other’s timing during the
playing of the overture, so Helen and William begin to pull back
the complex layers of their own relationship through examining
the history of the faltering marriage of the ‘stage within a stage’
couple, Paul and Rosemary. 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. They are reconciled
with the understanding that ‘the sexual life is a cheat’, and as
Helen suggests, it is a cheat which ‘takes us women in, just as it
does you men’. The couple agree to ‘share the cheat together –
with humour and kindness – with trust and deepening affection’
(Priestley 1949: 516). Priestley presents three couples as intel-
lectual 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. That Ever Since Paradise is theatrically more
sophisticated than the earlier play is a credit to Priestley’s
engagement with the processes of theatre (see Chapter 2) as much
as it is a result of the maturity of his playwriting. In releasing the
temporal framework of a play from the unities of time and place
and the boundaries of realism, Priestley challenges our perception
of what we see and turns the ‘domestic drama’ into something
more complex and theatrically challenging.
4 Time and the time plays
Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
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.
T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’,
in Four Quartets (Eliot 2001: 3)
Time, space and the modernist

sensibility
The construction of scientific and popular narratives about
notions of time reached a highpoint during the modernist period,
and especially so during the interwar years. Scientific and philo-
sophical discourses around the nature of time were irreversibly
influenced by a variety of innovations such as Einstein’s theories
of relativity, which had accumulated in the public domain by
1919. Einstein’s theories were based on the supposition that time,
space and distance are not absolute, and that their definition is
relative and relational to context and observer. Such theories
caused a seismic shift in the ways people thought about time and
the individual’s relation to the world and in turn the world’s
relationship to the universe. 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 produc-
tivity: thus Taylorism, derived from the theories of F.W. Taylor
based on time and motion studies in the workplace, became the
basic tenet of mass production within industry, in which the pro-
duction of goods was unimaginably increased by the introduction
of the conveyor belt and the assembly line (see for example Taylor
1911). Charlie Chaplin, much admired by Priestley, famously
deconstructed the effect of such ‘mass’ theories and working
practices on the individual in his wonderfully insightful film
Modern Times (1936).
Such scientific and industrial transitions were components of a
culture in which the fixed nature of political and religious
ideologies, economic foundations and social formations were
already undermined: the catastrophe of the First World War left
Europe, and Britain in particular, in a state of crisis and flux and
the attraction of the ‘immediacy of the modern’ so praised by the
avant garde, was combined with a loss of identity and a ‘growing
sense of dislocation and indeterminacy’ among the majority
(Parsons 2004: 175). Such transitions had already been set in
motion during the late Victorian period, but the
confident Edwardian world that approached war in 1914 had

by now dissolved into myth, and, surveying its ruins, modern
society faced a crisis of belief and identity.
(Parsons 2004: 175)
For some cultural historians and critics, time, with its associations
of memory, loss and the unknown, became such a ‘dominant
concern that it can be taken as a cultural signature . . . after the
war . . . it became a fully thematised subject in its own right’
(Levenson 2004: 197). After the First World War, there was no
return to the ‘known’ world of peace, but rather a present and a
future world which were unpredictable and alienating. This idea
of a ‘new world’ is one which Priestley embraced to a greater
extent in his plays during and after the Second World War (see
Chapter 5), but during the 1930s and early 1940s much of his
dramatic writing out of the issues around concepts of time – the
Time and the time plays 91
loss of time, the compression of time and the reversal and recur-
rence of time – were predicated on the theories of mathematician
J.W. Dunne and ‘mystic’ P. Ouspensky as well as on a belief that
trying to understand the relationship between time, and individual
and social responsibility, could create a society in which the
individual and in turn the ‘group’, might flourish. Priestley’s
understanding that ‘spatial and temporal practices are never
neutral affairs’ and that the ‘instability in the special and temporal
practices around which social life might be organised’ (Harvey
1990: 239) produced by the interwar experience, was vital to the
ways in which he ‘played’ upon and experimented with notions
and possible definitions of time in his theatrical work.
Priestley and the culture of time

Priestley has a certain reputation which derives from his interest
in time as a fourth dimension: known as the author of ‘time’ plays,
his interest in theories of time expose a convergence of a number
of other areas of thematic focus in his playwriting. Clive Barker
suggests that Priestley was not alone in his dramatic experiments
with time during the mid-twentieth century (Barker 2000: 230–1).
The proposition that flashbacks, ‘flash forwards and other
cinematic techniques’ were used by numerous playwrights ‘to
manipulate our responses by presenting alternative interpretations
of what we normally experience as events happening in linear
time’ (Barker 2000: 230–1), refers, however, to the exception
rather than the rule: Priestley was alone in his continuing obses-
sion, on a variety of levels, with aspects of time in his playwriting.
For other playwrights it was a fleeting contemplation, for Priestley
it was a theme to which he returned from different perspectives,
again and again.
Barker pinpoints the cultural significance of the varying non-
linear/circular time theories prevalent during the interwar years:
circular time – which merges past, present and future – allows
for an avoidance of disaster as ‘the moment of [its] happening will
come round again’, thus we can change our responses to events
and alter our destiny. Equally however, if time is predestined then
we don’t have to take any responsibility for our actions (Barker
92 Key plays
2000: 230–1). Priestley manipulated these two seeming opposi-
tions in his ‘time’ plays, where often our relationship to time as
played out in the text is skewed or the characters experience time
in a form which places them ‘outside’ of time in terms of the
everyday and theatrical understanding of it. Similarly, his pre-
occupation with what would now be considered ‘mystical’ or
spiritually driven theories of time, which had a certain cultural
currency during the interwar years, meant that his plays often
demanded an engagement with questions around ‘being’ and
‘becoming’, a self-reflection about individual and social action
and responsibility. For David Harvey (1990):
the opposition between Being and Becoming has been central

to modernism’s history . . . seen in political terms as a tension
between the sense of time and the focus of space. . . . 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.
(Harvey 1990: 283)
For Priestley, the intersection of Jungian ideas, and the theories

of J.W. Dunne and in turn, P. Ouspensky, created the opportunity
to dramatise this supposed opposition between ‘being’ and
‘becoming’, whereby through presenting time as the fourth dimen-
sion, life narratives and the order of events can be questioned
and altered.
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.
(Man and Time: Priestley 1964: 76)
For Grover Smith, Priestley was able, in his writings on time,

to demystify and ‘illustrate the force of Dunne’s speculations’
(Smith 1957: 224). Certainly, Dunne is given thorough treatment
in Priestley’s Man and Time, written many years after his own
‘experiments with time’ in theatre. J.W. Dunne, originally a
successful aeronautical inventor, was for Priestley, the most
‘important figure in the campaign against the conventional idea
of Time’ (Priestley 1964: 244). His discovery and explanation of
‘the displacement in time’ in dreams lead to his rejection of the
idea that our lives, ‘are completely contained by chronological
uni-dimensional time’, and Priestley admired Dunne’s ability to
demystify propositions such as the notion that we can experience
our future while in a dream state – thus our dreaming self cannot
be ‘contained with passing time’ – and his suggestion that such
possibilities are not reserved for the elite or the spiritually
sophisticated alone (Priestley 1964: 245–70). Although cynical
about some of Dunne’s ideas and wary of the passive role given
to Dunne’s ‘Observers’ of time – that we observe different aspects
of time and can articulate the observance of our observing ad
infinitum – Priestley latched on to the idea of ‘serial time’ espoused
by Dunne in An Experiment with Time (1927). 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.
Playing with time: Dangerous Corner

(1932), Time and the Conways (1937)
and An Inspector Calls (1945)
Looking back in 1941, Priestley identified a sense that the world
was already preparing for the rupture that would be caused by
the Second World War by the mid-to-late 1930s. He stated that
in 1938, ‘even though the landslide had hardly begun, there was
many a rumble, many a crack. . . . The time was out of joint
(Priestley 1941a: 131). This feeling, that time is somehow ‘out of
joint’, was one which haunted many writers during the interwar
years (see Levenson 2004) and is reflected in Priestley’s Dangerous
Corner, albeit applied in a simplified manner (Innes 1992: 368).
Considered by some critics as ‘a shallow and contrived effort’
(Skloot 1970: 426) and by Priestley as a ‘trick thing’ (Priestley
94 Key plays
1962: 195) the plot turns around two devices, the first is that, as
Priestley describes it, ‘time divided at the sound of a musical
cigarette box’, both at the beginning and towards the end of the
play (Priestley 1962: 195). Time is replayed and reconstructed as
events from the past – the veracity of which are constantly in
question – dominate the narrative. Thus at the point at which the
identity of the music box comes into question in Act I (see Chapter
3), and Robert Caplan demands that the ‘truth’ of the family
history be untangled from the charade of middle-class respect-
ability, time moves between the present and the past, recon-
structing each in our minds as it flows. Skloot (1970) also notes
that as each act begins where the last left off, time is ‘suspended
rather than broken’ and suggests that in fact here, Priestley is more
interested in the ‘tricks time can play’ than with any actual theories
of time (Skloot 1970: 428). As Act III of the play ends, so time is
accelerated and we are sent back to the beginning of the play: the
scene repeated from Act I has incidental text removed and here
Priestley plays with our memory. We recognise the text and the
stage picture from Act I, but, just as films on second viewing seem
to be quicker because we have viewed them before, and so are
waiting for things we know are about to pass to happen, so by
the time we recognise we have returned to the beginning of Act
I, the text appears to be moving faster and in fact, because of the
omissions, it is. What we assume to be a gunshot implicating
Robert’s suicide, then appears to be the sound of gunshot which
is part of the play the family are listening to on the radio – the
same play they are listening to at the beginning of Act I. Innes
reads the looping of Act III back onto the beginning of the play
as a means whereby the
naturalistic uncovering of dark secrets, and the acting out of

violent crime, are nothing but an illusion, a trompe l’oeil. The
classic detective story twist here is that the murder never
happened.
(Innes 1992: 369)
Alternately, one might read this twist as a rather clever theatrical

device: we have witnessed what we then are unsure has actually
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. Smith
suggests that in writing Dangerous Corner Priestley had already
been influenced by Ouspensky’s theories of time recurrence (see
pp. 91–92) but in fact the play owes far more to the combination
of the author’s knowledge of the prevalent detective and thriller
plays popular at the time (see Stokes 2000) and his desire to play
with and challenge the form of the genre.
The device used in Dangerous Corner is reapplied later in
Priestley’s career with An Inspector Calls (see Chapter 7). 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. Birling
has suggested that his daughter’s feelings of ‘Fire and Blood and
Anguish’, while under interrogation by Goole, are a sign that she
‘can’t even take a joke’ (Priestley 1994: 220). This is of course
completely undermined, as is our perception of the story, by the
ending of the play. What we have been convinced was a hoax
appears to have been some kind of premonition – Goole, as his
name suggests, may have been ‘unreal’, but the moral turpitude
of the Birling family is all too real. We are effectively, though not
technically as with Dangerous Corner, being sent back to the
beginning of the play.
The manipulation of audience perception was used again by
Priestley in what is one of his definitive ‘time plays’, Time and
the Conways. Here Dunne’s theory of serial time, that we are all
‘a series of observers’ functioning ‘in a series of times’ (Innes 1992:
370) is more overtly applied as Priestley himself noted:
96 Key plays
Suddenly I saw that there was a play in the relation between
a fairly typical middle-class provincial family and the theory
of Time, the theory chiefly associated with J.W. Dunne over
which I had been brooding over the past two years.
(Priestley, quoted in DeVitis and Kalson 1980: 153)
The play takes the form of a well-made, three-act drama except

that by reversing the chronology of the second and third acts,
Priestley creates uncertainty as to the relationship between what
we see happening on stage and its relation to ‘reality’. Act I ends
in semi-darkness with Kay’s head ‘silvered in moonlight. Very still
she listens to the music, and seems to stare not at but into
something, and as the song goes soaring away, the curtain creeps
down’ (Priestley 1994: 33). 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 (1937). Act II begins exactly
where Act I ended although Kay appears changed: ‘Something
elusive, a brief vision, a score of shadowy presentiments is
haunting her. She is deeply disturbed. She throws a look or two
at the room, as if she has just seen it in some other guise’ (Priestley
1994: 62). We are back at the end of the birthday party
celebrations from Act I, and just as Kay is uncertain whether she
has been sleeping or awake and drifting into daydreaming, so we
are unsure whether the events of Act II which have been played
out before us were ‘real’ or not: we don’t know whether time has
made the seeming solidity of the family fall apart, or whether Kay
has ‘dreamed’ her future. Act II ends with a conversation about
time led by Kay’s brother Alan.
KAY: . . . We’ve seen it tonight. Time’s beating us.

ALAN: No, Time’s only a kind of dream. . . . If it wasn’t it
would have to destroy everything – the whole of the
universe – and then remake it again every tenth of a
second. But time doesn’t destroy anything. It merely
moves us on – in this life – from one peep-hole to the next.
KAY: But the happy young Conways . . . they’ve gone . . .
ALAN: No, they’re real and existing . . . We’re seeing
another bit of the view . . . – but the whole landscape is
there.
KAY: But, Alan, we can’t be anything but what we are now.
ALAN: No . . . it’s hard to explain . . . suddenly like this
. . . at this moment, or any moment, we’re only a cross-
section of our real selves. 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. And then perhaps we’ll find
ourselves in another time, which is only a kind of dream
. . . You know, I believe half our trouble now is because
we think Time’s ticking our lives away. That’s why we
snatch and grab and hurt each other . . . I think it’s easier
not to – if you take the long view.
KAY: As if we’re – immortal beings?
ALAN: . . . Yes, and in for a tremendous adventure.
Numerous critics have pointed out that, here, Priestley makes

direct reference to Dunne’s theories: 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 . . . the audience is grateful
for something to cling to in the midst of a life of pain.
Pseudoscientific explanations are beside the point.
(DeVitis and Kalson 1980: 158–9)
Innes proposes that Dunne’s theories ‘offer support for the

rejection of individuality as a subjective illusion’ (Innes 1992:
370), it is certainly the case that if we read the presentation of
the family in the play as a warning against middle-class com-
placency, then we can see the individual nature of the Conway
family’s conflicts as a reflection of and authorial comment upon
a more general situation (see Chapter 3).
98 Key plays
The play was highly successful during its original run (see
Appendix) although Priestley was furious at the critical reaction
which dismissed the theoretical underpinning of the play, an
underpinning which one critic feels to be ‘as dulling as when a
figure or event in fiction must be accepted as unquestionably
supernatural and not in any way an emanation of the character’s
unconscious fears or desires’ (Chothia 1996: 108).
That this theory should be hastily and contemptuously

dismissed, by light-hearted newspapermen who had never
given an hour’s thought to the subject, seemed to me then,
and seems to me still, unpardonable. With each of the Time
plays, both in London and New York, many dramatic critics,
with an air of vast intellectual superiority, produced obser-
vations that were childish.
Dunne’s theories had received serious analysis and had a certain

currency among the general populace, and for Priestley his work
was ‘as important as it was at first difficult to understand’ (1941).
Critical reaction to Priestley’s next play, I Have Been Here Before,
was more enamoured with the way in which Priestley applied the
combined ideas of Ouspensky and Dunne, perhaps because the
plot creates more direct links to the more common time-shifting
experience of déjà vu.
Dramatising time theories: I Have Been

Here Before (1937)
Of I Have Been Here Before, Priestley later wrote:
It is not – and was never intended to be – a play about rein-

carnation. It is a play about recurrence, a theory I openly
borrowed from Ouspensky’s New Model of the Universe.
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
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 . . . I wanted to make dramatic use of the
familiar but always eerie feeling that we have been actors in
a certain scene before, of the sense, known to most of us
though not all, of déjà vu.
It is interesting that the play was as successful as Time and the

Conways in its original production, and that the basis of the
theoretical propositions which Priestley worked into the plot was
more ‘spiritually’ inclined than Dunne’s. Ouspensky was a Russian
émigré whose theoretical work about time and consciousness
gained a devoted following among eminent literati such as
Katherine Mansfield and emerging Jungian psychoanalysts like Dr
Maurice Nicholl.1 Priestley was not a ‘follower’ as such but was
intrigued by Ouspensky’s idea that the invisible or ‘spiritual’ world
was accessible to the normal gaze through dispensing with the
‘limitations of conventional logic’, and that such ‘invisible worlds’
could be accessible to ‘the higher levels of consciousness which
man can develop if he chooses’ (Reyner 1981: 6). None of this
appears immediately to relate to Priestley as a socialist whose work
was heavily influenced by his position on class and social action.
However, it is important to remember that Ouspensky’s work,
for all its mystical qualities, was a reflection of a belief implicitly
shared by Priestley, that mid-twentieth century man had become
‘fractured or dissociated’ and that this was a general as opposed
to an individual position: Ouspensky did not believe that a return
to ‘normalcy’ – a state of non-fracture – was possible, but rather
that one ‘could arrive at a higher self’.2 Priestley saw the ‘Work’
which Ouspensky’s followers undertook, as far removed from the
tenets of the usual ‘soft and sentimental doctrines of Higher
Thought, Theosophy and the rest’ (Priestley 1964: 264). The idea
that man should rid himself of his automatic and mechanical
reactions to the everyday world and operate on a more conscious
level appealed to Priestley, who, although wary of the non-scientific
nature of Ouspensky’s writing (see Priestley 1964), nevertheless
adopted and applied some of his ideas around the recurrence of
100 Key plays
time, which Ouspensky considered to be three dimensional – past,
present and future converge at any given moment.
Thus in I Have Been Here Before, Dr Görtler is the outsider, a
European émigré and an intellectual, within the English holiday
weekend setting of a North Yorkshire village inn run by Sam
Shipley and his daughter Sally. Thinking they are fully booked for
the weekend, they turn Görtler away, finding it odd that he tells
them he must have arrived in the wrong year, only to have their
prospective guests cancel. Then Ormund and his wife arrive, take
two rooms and we also meet Farrant, a school teacher at the
school set up and run by a charitable trust funded by Ormund’s
business. Görtler returns, is given a room and makes numerous
comments which imply that he has some detailed knowledge
of the other guests. Görtler makes Sally ‘feel uneasy in [her]
mind’ (Priestley 1994: 118) and she treats him as the unwelcome
foreigner. Ormund engages in conversation with Görtler about
his own past and his feelings about his horrific war experiences
and, as he becomes steadily more inebriated from the whiskey to
which he appears to be addicted, about his fantasies of suicide.
Meanwhile, his wife Janet and Farrant spend the day out walking
and somehow become besotted with each other.
As the play progresses, Görtler openly discusses his theories of
time:
time is not single and universal. It is only the name we give

to higher dimensions of things. In our present state of con-
sciousness, we cannot experience these dimensions spatially,
but only successively. That we call time. But there are more
times than one.
When Farrant sees Görtler’s ideas as irrational, Ormund’s

response suggests that caution as opposed to arrogant dismissal
would be wise on Farrant’s part:
Don’t be too sure you know it all. Don’t think you’ve got it
all worked out. You bright young men, with your outlines of
everything, are going to be horribly surprised yet.
Ormund, in whom Priestley wanted to represent ‘the deep dis-
trust of life felt by so many moderns . . . a man with a wounded
psyche’, is placed between ‘a typically cock-sure young materialist
[Farrant], busy over-simplifying everything, and a mystic . . . a
deadly liability in a play’ (Priestley 1941a: 50–1). Through his
further discussions with Görtler, Ormund decides not to take
his own life when Janet tells him she is leaving him, and his new
found self-knowledge and sense of calm almost persuade her to
stay. Görtler tells Ormund that his decision to live and begin a
new and more positively framed life, not to ‘return to the old dark
circle of existence, dying endless deaths’, but to ‘break the spell
and swing out into new life’, is a sign that he has ‘moved onto a
new time track’ (Priestley 1994: 152–5). In other words, Ormund
lets his wife go freely with her lover and does not threaten her
with financial ruin or public humiliation. Through this choice of
action he becomes free to create his own future and the disaster
which Görtler foresaw – that the pain of separation would leave
all three, Ormund, Janet and Farrant in a state of collapse, is
avoided.
For some literary critics the play remains an ‘unconvincing
melodrama’ where the linguistic style awkwardly changes to fit
the complexity of theory which it explores (DeVitis and Kalson
1980: 162; also see Atkins 1981). Others note that the heightened
language at the end of the play is a necessary reflection of the fact
that each of the key characters have moved away from their
normative, everyday reactions to emotional challenges, that they
are ‘taken out of the commonplace’ through engaging with
Görtler’s theories (Braine 1978: 80). The mainstream theatre
critics of the time were less hostile than one might have expected
and saw the play as an ‘intensely interesting’ attempt to explore
the idea that fate is not inevitable, that it was, ‘three times as
exciting and five times as constructive as Time and the Conways’.3
After this play, however, Priestley moved away from the exposi-
tion of time theories towards a more direct experimental mani-
pulation of the theatrical dynamics and possibilities of time. 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: we go inside the minds of the
102 Key plays
characters and this carries more importance than what actually
‘happens’ on stage.
The expansion of time: Ever Since

Paradise (1947), Music at Night (1939)
and Johnson Over Jordan (1939)
As a play, Ever Since Paradise relies on our voyeuristic desires to
glimpse inside other people’s marital affairs. 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. Priestley
even parodies his use of Dunne and Ouspensky – the latter’s work,
thinly disguised, as being that of the well-known ‘Madame
Rubbishky’ (Priestley 1949a: 490), as the couples discuss philo-
sophical concepts relative to their situations and experiences. The
dramatic frame is initially constructed around two of the couples,
one of which provides musical accompaniment for the others, who
act as narrators. But as Innes notes, ‘the dramatic frame is
increasingly broken’ as the narrative moves us backwards and
forwards in time (Innes 1992: 357). The fourth wall is removed
for the audience, who are at times directly addressed and the
linearity of the narrative is fragmented and broken into by Helen
and William, the narrators who move in and out of the ‘play’
which is being acted out behind them by Paul and Rosemary – the
character description for which is quite simply, The Example.
Time moves between real and reported time, in a non-chrono-
logical order, reflecting a dramatic technique ‘extremely sophisti-
cated’ for its era (Innes 1992: 357). Innes argues that the play is
structured around the idea of a hall of ‘self-reflecting mirrors’
whereby each of the couples reflects the historical relationship of
the others – William and Helen, long divorced, see parallels
between what happened in their own marriage and that of the
couple they are ‘reporting’ on. Similarly Philip and Joyce, the
accompanists, learn more about their relationship through
witnessing and participating in the story of Paul and Rosemary.
Time is stopped, repeated, replayed and projected forward.
For Innes, although a ‘stylistic advance’, Priestley’s experi-
mentation is here, ‘under-cut by the comic clichés’(Innes 1992:
357), yet other critics have noted that the play has parallels with
Brechtian technique.
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.
(DeVitis and Kalson 1980: 176–7)
Although they also point to the fact that Priestley’s is not a

‘political’ play, but one which reveals and asks for recognition
rather than action. Ever Since Paradise is, however, a play in
which Priestley chose to ‘explore a universal theme in an
experimental form, marking it as one of his most innovative pieces
. . . the comedy is actually prophetic in suggesting another
theatrical form which would soon be in vogue’ (DeVitis and
Kalson 1980: 176–7). 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 chrono-
logical order, childhood and adult life interrupting each other,
all of which can bring a piercing sweetness, a queer poig-
nancy, and, again, dramatic experience a little different from
what one has known before.
For Innes, Johnson Over Jordan is more successful as an

experiment because it presents the action ‘from the perspective
of a single protagonist who is central to every scene’ (Innes 1992:
104 Key plays
375). What is interesting about the play in terms of representa-
tions 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: although he is in a dream-like state he also
experiences the connection between the past and future and the
present moment – he is in the office, he is in the nightclub and so
on and while in these locations he is witnessing moments from his
past while living in the present, albeit ‘dream’ time.
Priestley’s use of deceptive time frameworks is repeated in
Music at Night, a play originally written for the Malvern Drama
Festival and produced in the West End in the same year as Johnson
Over Jordan, but after the theatres had reopened, having been
shut down at the outbreak of the Second World War. For
Priestley, there are moments in the play which have the ‘strange
timeless poignancy of a dream’ (Priestley 1944: vi); it is certainly
the case that while the characters are listening to the new concerto
written and played by David Shiel, we see them become ‘half
hypnotised into reliving the crises of their pasts’ (Smith 1957:
229). 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 working-
class pasts. As the three acts, structured around three movements
of the new concerto, progress, we play witness to the remem-
brances 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 ‘action’ is predominantly internal and as a result some have
suggested that the play is dealing with the psychological conun-
drum of ‘personality’ (Rogers 1968: 15), while others liken it to
O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928) and read the play as represent-
ing the struggle with ‘dead time’ which many experience while
listening to music (Smith 1957: 229; see also Skloot 1970).
The musical framework gives both unity to the setting and
provides an opportunity to suspend time – the play lasts longer
than a concerto would – and creates an atmosphere of ‘other’ time
even though the text is full of contemporary references to the war
– the Nazi regime and the aristocratic fascination with Nazism in
a barely disguised reference to the Mitford sisters. We are taken
back in time to 1920, to the First World War and the moment
that hostess Mrs Amesbury’s son was killed in an aeroplane, to
Chilham’s imaginary South Sea island and so on. The characters
move outside themselves to represent people from the dreams of
others on stage, or the voices of nameless groups of people. As
the text moves in and out of specified time and geography, so the
theatrical challenges of the play become more and more apparent:
towards the end of Act III, the stage space transforms out of all
recognition as the concerto draws to an end.
the lights change so that the room seems to have vanished and
we see a wide sky behind and in front of it two columns that
might be part of some dateless temple. 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.
Just as Priestley wanted to move the action from the ‘surface

of the mind to deeper and deeper levels of consciousness’ (quoted
in Evans 1964: 137) so too his utilisation of multiple locations
and temporal references take us further away from the individual-
ised specifics set up at the beginning of the play, towards a more
‘universal’ non-specified location as the play nears the end. In
typical Priestley fashion we are brought back to the musical par-
lour 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.
106 Key plays
Priestley’s time plays, as well as exploring actual theories of time,
also reflect his interest in the relationship between the individual
psyche, aspiration and human potential. Theatrically they place
him, especially taking into account the latter plays, alongside less
‘popular’ non-commercial playwrights more accepted by the
modernist fraternity, such as Auden and Isherwood (Innes 1992:
377). The fact that Priestley was working in mainstream theatre
where audience appeal had to be a major economic, and therefore
artistic, consideration, did not stop him experimenting with form
and ideology or from pushing at the boundaries of the audience’s
expectations of the theatrical experience: this is as much the case
with his ‘future time’/’utopian’ plays examined in Chapter 5.
5 Work and visions of
dystopia/utopia
They will tell us we can’t change human nature. That’s one

of the oldest excuses in the world for doing nothing. . . .
We’ve been changing human nature for thousands of years.
But what you can’t change in it – . . . is man’s eternal desire
and vision and hope of making this world a better place to
live in . . . – you can see this desire and vision and hope, bigger
and stronger than ever beginning to light up men’s faces . . .
one here, one there . . . – until you begin to see there are
millions of us – yes, armies and armies of us – enough to build
ten thousand new cities.
(They Came to a City: Priestley 2003b: 95)
Richard Dyer notes that ‘two of the taken-for-granted descriptions

of entertainment, as “escape” and as “wish-fulfilment”’ point to
its central thrust, namely, utopianism’ (Dyer 2002: 20). Dyer is
quick to note the oversimplified nature of such descriptions, far
removed as they are from any traditional notion of cultural
production which encompasses the utopian, but he rightly claims
these loose terms as reflections of the fact that the ‘utopianism’
present in mass entertainment per se, ‘works at the level of sensi-
bility’, presenting possible other worlds in a general sense rather
than one which outlines ‘ideal’ worlds and how they might be
organised (Dyer 2002: 20).
Both an informal and a formal embracing of utopias and
utopianism are present in Priestley’s work. Using theories of time
in his plays and experimenting with actual time in theatrical time
108 Key plays
(see Chapter 4) could both be seen as active attempts to alter the
relationship between the world as imagined and the ‘possible
worlds’ implied, where the future is presented as changeable and
the characters are given the opportunity to move towards their
imagined ideal. More formally, however, in plays such as They
Came to a City (1943) and Summer Day’s Dream (1949), Priestley
actually creates a ‘utopian world’ on stage, whereby the kind of
dominant motifs of a utopian vision which Dyer notes George
Kateb originally proposed, are debated:
a world permanently without strife, poverty, constraint,

stultifying labour, irrational authority, sensual deprivation
. . . peace, abundance, leisure, equality, consonance of men
and their environment.
(Kateb 1972: 9, quoted in Dyer 2002: 25)
Beginning his playwriting career in the 1930s, Priestley was writing

at a time when the post First World War economic depression
created an environment of social flux, and he kept a sharp eye on
the political scene as well as having a strong sense of the ways in
which economics impacted on everyday life. As Holger Klein has
pointed out, in earlier plays such as Bees on the Boat Deck and
Laburnum Grove Priestley clearly condemns the world as is,
heavily critiquing, albeit through a comic or farcical framework,
the exercise of ‘arbitrary private power’.1 Priestley thought the
country’s financial developments should be managed centrally by
the government, rather than being dependent on private individuals
and investors who have only their own interests at heart. His call
for a ‘bourgeois democracy’ was a reaction to the continuing
concentration of real economic power among the ruling classes
(Priestley 1941a: 241). However, he is clear, especially in his
polemical work Out of the People – published as part of the
Vigilant Books series which had the remit of ‘dealing with the
problems of reconstruction after the war’ (Priestley 1941b) – that
an alternative to the masters/masses dichotomy was urgently
needed, that a ‘better society’ would not come from simply
changing the class of those in power, but that the power structures
themselves needed to be changed. Classing himself as ‘essentially
Work and visions of dystopia/utopia 109
bourgeois and middle-class’, Priestley wanted to change the balance
of social and economic power between the ‘producer of goods’ and
the ‘lender of money’ (Priestley 1941a: 241, 243).
I am on the side of the workers, the masses (that most insult-

ing 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 com-
munal cement works have been published.
Baxendale (2007) has noted the omnipresence of critiques of

Priestley among recent historians of the modernists, where they
accuse him of pandering to the petit-bourgeois, the ‘shopkeeper
classes’, and in doing so offer a false reading of Priestley’s appeal
and political standing (see Baxendale 2007). Priestley’s utopian
vision of post-war reconstruction was in fact far more broad based
and radical in its appeal. Writing in 1941, and without the
political pressure faced during his BBC broadcasts (see Chapter
1), Priestley proposed that a ‘vital democratic system’ would
benefit the whole of society, realising the potential of the
individual and the community: the war provided an opportunity
for crucial political change.
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 . . . because this time it is not an affair of
one class being promoted to power but of the whole class
system breaking down, leaving the people free . . . we are all
the people so long as we are willing to consider ourselves the
people, so long, in fact, as we put the community before any
sectional interests.
The collapse of the barriers and disappearance of the
ramifications of the class system will act like the blowing up
of a dam.
110 Key plays
The beginnings of such political change were to happen, to some
extent, with the Labour landslide victory in 1945 and the imple-
mentation of the Welfare State a few years later. Priestley’s plays
make no grand call for revolution however, but consistently make
reference to the ways in which the individual might recognise their
social and political potential, whether in the private world of the
family or the public world of work. Priestley did not imbue his
plays with a ‘message’ in any crass sense, but his belief in human
potential and possibilities for real social change colours many of
them, especially those written in the late 1930s and 1940s.
In terms of Priestley’s utopian visions, Raymond Williams’s
distinction of four ‘types’ of integrated utopian/dystoptian
narrative is useful. Williams groups these as the paradise, the
externally altered world, the willed transformation and the
technological transformation (Williams 2005). Priestley does not
move towards the former ‘paradise’ until They Came to a City
and Summer Day’s Dream but the other three definitions are all
pertinent to earlier plays which deal with critiques of capitalism
all framed in terms of the experience of professional life.
The meaning of professional life: Bees

on the Boat Deck (1936), The Linden
Tree (1947) and Cornelius (1935)
‘Professional plays’ whereby the dynamics of office life, running
a small business or even choosing between whether one worked
for a company or took the risk of working for oneself, had a
certain currency on West End stages during the interwar years in
particular (see Gale 2004a, 2004b). But Priestley’s emphasis is
on the relationship between professional life, personal ideology
and individual psychology within a framework of cultural
transformation. Thus in Bees on the Boat Deck, ‘a clever attempt
to reduce the political scene to terms of farcical comedy’ (Hughes
1958: 160), Priestley critiques a structure in which economic
planning was ‘based on human expediency and human effort was
grossly wasted’ (Evans 1964: 162). Here Gridley and Patch are
in charge of looking after the no-longer seaworthy S.S. Gloriana.
The play contains the deliberate introduction of a variety of social
‘types’ as the plot by the owner – helped by his exploitation of
the naivety of an onboard scientist developing explosives – to
destroy the ship and collect the insurance money is foiled by the
two comic leads. 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. In response to the communist party worker Gaster for
whom ‘Our first duty is to the revolution, the proletarian state,
the real community’, and capitalist owners are culpable for all
wrongs, Gridley points out, ‘it’s not just a case of the have and
the have-nots’ (Priestley 1949a: 136). When Gaster suggests that
those who made the ship are the real owners, Gridley cynically
tells him,
Most of ’em wouldn’t know if they were making a ship or a

skating rink and wouldn’t care . . . I don’t want a party, yours
or anybody else’s. I don’t care about capitalists and
proletarians, masses and bosses. . . . I want to see some
men about, real men who know what sense is and duty is
and order is.
Priestley deliberately places his two comic leads among a number

of ideological polarities: Lord Cottingley, the capitalist, Gaster,
the communist, and Captain Mellock, the fascist. In doing so he
allows them to explore the politics of their working lives – they
choose a philosophy of honesty, hard work and duty as the means
by which they might find professional and satisfaction.
Gareth Lloyd Evans is critical of the way in which Priestley
placed his political analysis inside a comic framework, feeling that
ultimately the themes are ‘exploited for ends which contradict
them’ (Evans 1964: 164), but this is to ignore the powerful
relationship between comedy and political critique. 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. The depth and
frequency of overt ideological statements in the play may well
112 Key plays
have lacked appeal for audiences who thought they were going
to see a ‘farcical tragedy’ – but for Priestley this play on genre was
deliberate: a strong political analysis embedded in a farcical
framework. Clearly the world in which Gridley and Patch
function is dystopian, but Priestley gives them the potential to
effect change through action. This presentation of a hero in the
face of a society transformed, with the potential to stand his
ground and battle with the injustice brought about by the ‘politics’
of professional life, found more resonance with audiences in
Priestley’s later play, The Linden Tree, produced after the Second
World War, when audiences were far more directly affected by
the political sentiments which Priestley lampooned and critiqued
in Bees on the Boat Deck.
The Linden Tree’s Professor Linden, a university teacher who
has lived a life of relative privilege, is faced with overcoming the
new regime running his provincial university. Much to his wife’s
disgust, he left Oxford University to work in Burmanley, which
is now in the virtual control of Dr Lidley, a ‘high pressure
educationalist’, a successful ‘director of education in several
cities’ (Priestley 1994: 228). Linden’s work environment has, in
Williams’s (2005) terms, undergone a ‘willed transformation’
leaving his vision of a utopian educational environment – where
students are nurtured and encouraged to think for themselves –
in a dystopian state. Of Lidley, Linden notes, ‘He educationalizes
– in quite a big dashing sort of way. It’s something quite different
from educating people – newer and much better. They’ll probably
have machines to do it soon, when they can import them from
America’ (Priestley 1994: 254). Lidley represents the drive for
non-individualised learning, turning universities into educational
factories, whereas for Linden education should be moulded to
individual need. Even though he is of retirement age, Linden wants
to fight against the university authorities and carry on working,
despite his professional environment metaphorically having ‘a
pinched look, frayed cuffs and down-at-heel-shoes’, he prefers to
stay, to be part of the ‘crew’ as opposed to a passenger, to ‘help
a bit if I can’ (Priestley 1994: 283). Although he admits that his
son Rex’s ability to make money may be something he secretly
craved himself, Linden is left behind in Burmanley when his wife
chooses to go with Rex and live a life of gentile and luxurious
retirement. Thus Linden, whose workplace is less and less like the
mirror of Oxford University which he would have liked it to
become (Priestley 1994: 228, 247), chooses to continue his
contribution to the community. 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 400 performances, with a cast including theatrical icons Sybil
Thorndike and Lewis Casson. Hughes (1958) suggests that this
may have been because Linden’s is
the bewildered eye through which a changing society is

viewed, analysed and finally understood; and his children are
the guinea-pigs of that society, each of them representing a
typical post-war reaction and displaying the dangers that
particularly threaten a world in need of red-blood and hard-
headed courage.
(Hughes 1958: 204)
The play corresponded to a very specific ‘culturally and histori-

cally determined sensibility’ (Dyer 2002: 21), but it is interesting
that in reviews of a recent production at The Orange Tree theatre
in London, critics alluded to the fact that Linden’s sentiments are
as relevant nowadays as they were after the Second World War.
The Guardian reviewer found it to be the ‘most topical play on
the London stage’, while the reviewer for the Evening Standard
claimed that the play probed all the ‘anxieties of our modern,
progressive middle class’ and the Daily Telegraph, not know for
its leftist stance, reviewed the production as speaking with
‘extraordinary freshness to our own pessimistic age’.2
The struggle to deal with external change as part of an attempt
to find satisfaction in the work environment was also the under-
lying theme of Cornelius (1936), an earlier, less successful play.3
Performed to pre-war audiences, and subtitled ‘A Business Affair
in Three Transactions’, the text makes frequent mention of the
114 Key plays
economic context and deals with the effects of the collapse in
foreign trade, the transformation of business methods – no longer
personalised but catering to more competitive mass markets – and
the changing relationship between both business and the economy
and, as a result, the individual and the experience of professional
life. Cornelius is running ‘Briggs and Murrison’ in the absence of
Murrison, who is scouring the country for new contracts in a
faltering economic climate. As the play progresses, Priestley
presents different attitudes to work in the variety of characters
who are employed in the office: Miss Porrin and Mr Biddle, the
two long-term and loyal employees, are pitched against Lawrence,
young, ambitious and looking for more rewarding work else-
where. Cornelius’s belief in the ability of Murrison to save the
firm slowly disintegrates as meetings with creditors and
Murrison’s seeming mental breakdown on his return, make it
obvious that the company will not survive. Realising that society
does not necessarily provide rewarding employment for anyone
willing to work hard, Cornelius is faced again and again with the
possibility that the world is ‘closed’ to some and we are all in fact
like ‘bees in a glass cage’ (Priestley 1936b: 24). As he states:
I’ve always had at the back of my mind a little open door,

with plantations and jungles and pampas and quartz moun-
tains just outside it – with the sun on ’em. Don’t tell me that
all the time that little door’s not been open, has been locked
from the outside, screwed fast.
At the end of each act, Cornelius refers to a book he is reading

on South America and fantasises about the adventures he might
have there as an alternative to the professional life he is embroiled
in. By the end of Act III, his utopian vision of the Andes provides
escape from the option of suicide taken by Murrison: while the
others condemn Murrison’s choice, Cornelius points to suicide as
a positive way out,
they won’t have life on any terms. We will . . . we linger on

and on in the bit of light that’s left – calling it sticking it –
when all the time we are simply frightened of the jump into
the dark.
Cornelius takes this ‘jump’ in choosing not to commit suicide

himself after the firm has gone into receivership at the end of the
play. He throws away the revolver he has pensively been handling,
hurls the ledger so hard against the door it is smashed open, and
leave the stage while speaking, ‘jerkily’ but with ‘gathering force’,
words from his book about the Andes, ‘we decided to take the
track into the clouds – to find – amongst those heights . . . the
lost city of the Incas’ (Priestley 1936: 70).
With its poetic ending, Cornelius shows glimpses of the imagery
in the later Johnson Over Jordan (1939): Cornelius is a different
kind of ‘everyman’ to Robert Johnson, but there are similarities
in the ways in which each uses the immediacy of their present
situation to recapitulate on their pasts and re-evaluate their
possible futures (see Chapter 8). Although there is a sense in which
characters such as Mrs Porrin and Biddle represent a longing for
a bygone world, any element of nostalgia is firmly undermined by
Cornelius’s ability to analyse the present: one small business
cannot turn around the economic climate, nor can it halt progress
– the ‘Enormous offices, all glass and metal and light, open at ten
and closing at four’ of the future (Priestley 1936: 61). Never-
theless, he chooses not to be just a cog in the machine of com-
mercial business. Cornelius chooses an individualist path, whereas
for Professor Linden in The Linden Tree, the community still has
potential. Similar choices face the characters in Priestley’s later
‘utopia/dystopia’ plays, all of which suggest possible worlds
transformed by historical events.
Urban visions of utopia: They Came to a

City (1943)
Priestley conceived the idea for They Came to a City from the
early days of the war, but it was not written until 1942. A play
which explicitly reflected the ‘hopes and fears and sharp differ-
ences of opinion about the post-war world of various sections of
116 Key plays
the British people’, the original production ran for 280 perfor-
mances in London, mirroring the popularity of the numerous
productions which appeared countrywide (Priestley 1944: vi–vii).
For Evans, Priestley had a ‘calculated design upon the audience’
and the play is a ‘sincere piece of propaganda for Priestley’s belief
in the perfectability of man’ and his ‘unabashed vision of Utopia’
(Evans 1964: 193). DeVitis and Kalson make more of the fact that
with it Priestley ‘accurately gauged the mood of a nation at war’
and poignantly, that we are given very few details of the actualities
of the Utopia he creates on stage (DeVitis and Kalson 1980:
194–5). 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 geography and archi-
tecture of the city are implied through the setting, Priestley’s
opening description of which is very specifically detailed (see
Priestley 2003b: 20). The set is architectonic and lacks any
curvature – it is stark and imposing. We never see the city itself
and the passing of time is given pictorial dynamic through lighting,
which Priestley specifies should move through dawn to daylight,
sunset and dusk through shades of grey, blue and purple with
bright daylight streaming through the city doors when they first
open.
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. By the end of Act I all have
entered the city and Act II is devoted to their reactions to it. 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. Mrs Stritton,
wife of the banker from Leamington Spa, even goes so far as to
say that she hates the city, where people ‘don’t know how to
behave properly’ and ‘everybody pretends to be as good as every-
body else!’ (Priestley 2003b: 80). Her husband, who aspires to
Figure 4 They Came to a City, The Globe, London, 1943.

Photograph: John Vickers, London. Courtesy of the Mander
and Mitchenson Theatre Collection.
more than their safe middle-class life, loves the city where ‘They
have some people – great thinkers, scientists, artists – that they
admire and respect and look after better than we do any of our
really great people’ (Priestley 2003b: 80). 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
118 Key plays
comprehend or admire. Conversely, for Joe Dinmore, the dis-
illusioned ex-seaman, the city offers a level of equality which he
had only hitherto imagined: he admires the ‘social justice’ so
obviously present and this is what also attracts Lady Loxfield’s
daughter Philippa (who felt she ‘came alive in the city’), Alice the
waitress and Mrs Batley the cleaner – to whom the citizens offered
comfort and looked after for once in her life. Although Joe wants
to stay in the city with Alice, he also wants to tell as many people
as possible that the city exists, and so he and Alice are the last to
leave the stage to spread the news about the city where
Men and women don’t work for machines and money, but
machines and money work for men and women – where greed
and envy and hate have no place – where want and disease
and fear have vanished forever – where nobody carries a
whip. . . . Where men . . . have come out into the sunlight.
And nobody can ever darken it for them again. . . . ‘I dreamt
in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole
earth, I dreamt that was the new city of friends’.
Full of idealism, some have criticised the play for being

‘magnificent sermonising’ (Agate 1946: 84) and for being peopled
with social stereotypes (see DeVitis and Kalson 1980; Hughes
1958), but the characters are functional and subservient to the
thrust of the play’s argument which concentrates on the possibility
of an ideal new world in the face of the old world crumbling. For
Priestley this was a ‘work of “symbolic action” concerning
different attitudes of mind toward postwar change’ (DeVitis and
Kalson 1980: 196), and it is among his works which present real
theatrical challenge both in terms of style and composition,
condensed into two acts whereby all action is reported and implied.
Rural visions of utopian futures:

Summer Day’s Dream (1949)
Summer Day’s Dream is set in the future ‘post-Third War’ world
of 1975. With their ‘utopian’ existence forced upon them through
historical circumstance, Stephen Dawlish and his extended family
live on an old country estate now run as a farm. They exist by
growing their own food and bartering with neighbours in an
England so much reduced by the devastation of war, that the
nearest thing to a ‘capital’ is what remains of a small market town.
Dawlish and his family spend their days tending the land and
simply surviving in a world stripped of luxury. Despite this they
are content and have come to rejoice in the fact that they no longer
have time for anything that ‘doesn’t either feed our bodies or
refresh and rejoice our spirits’ (Priestley 2003b: 142). The pastoral
idyll is firmly interrupted by the arrival of three members of the
new dominant world powers – Heimer from ‘American Synthetic
Products’, Irina Shestova from the Russian government trade
department and Dr Bahru, a scientist working for the Indian
government. These three represent the world as was, the con-
tinuing dystopia out of which Dawlish’s utopia was ironically
made possible. The presence of the three reminds Dawlish and his
family of what it is they have gained through their lifestyle borne
of disaster, as they are threatened with the possible destruction
of their landscape by Heimer’s company, who plan to appropriate
the land and set up a factory city for the purpose of extracting
valuable deposits from the land. For the three foreigners such
extraction represents progress and is inevitable, for Dawlish and
his family it is a reminder of all the horrors of twentieth century
existence which they were forced to leave behind. As Dawlish
points out, the commodification of his land for the purposes of
industry is nothing but another opportunity for Heimer and his
kind to ‘drive blindly on and drag the rest of us choking in the
dust behind you’ (Priestley 2003b: 151).
The play is replete with discussions about the merits of industry
versus husbandry, of nature versus science, and the ending,
whereby the interlopers, so moved by the rural utopia and so
convinced by the dedication of the Dawlish family to this
‘alternative’ to their ‘first world’ existence, tell their respective
superiors that the land will not provide the commodity they had
originally thought it would. They return to their world of ‘TV-
Comms’ and ‘atomicars’, and Dawlish is left with his little bit of
non-capitalist, non-technology dependent utopia.
120 Key plays
For some the play ‘disarms criticism’ with its ‘languorous,
dreamlike setting’ although Priestley ultimately falls into ‘woolly-
mindedness’: the political message is embedded in an emotional
one about the power of love and the attraction of the rural idyll
(DeVitis and Kitson 1980: 212–13). One critic of the original
production wondered if it was in essence a short play somewhat
overworked and overwritten, is seen as a reason for its relative
short run in the West End (Atkins 1981: 222).4 Some critics,
however, saw the play as locating Priestley alongside Orwell and
Huxley in his ability to visualise future and dystopian/utopian
worlds.5 Priestley’s ideological proposition, whereby a world
based on profit at the cost of the comfort or happiness of
humankind, is pitched against an imagined one where there is
equality and harmony, is present in many of his plays but none
more so than the previous two plays discussed and Home is
Tomorrow.
Political dystopia/utopia: Home is

Tomorrow (1948)
Produced in 1948 and running for fewer than forty performances,6
Home is Tomorrow is a provocative play in which Priestley
suggests that technology and social development might help
improve the lives of the inhabitants of an imagined under-
privileged South Caribbean island, ‘Corobana’. DeVitis and
Kalson point out that this is ironic in terms of what the slightly
later Summer Day’s Dream offers as a view of technology (DeVitis
and Kalson 1980: 213), but both plays present an analysis of
colonisation in very different contexts.
Edward Fortrose is employed by the United Nations Under-
developed Territories Organisation (UNUTO), an organisation
which has the United Nations at its centre. His team of officers,
doctors, scientists and administrators is attempting to introduce
proper medical care and education to the islanders who have been
hitherto exploited by various European colonisers. As he imposes
UNUTO values on the islanders, so those native to the island with
a more radical agenda try to block his team’s work. Fortrose is
drawn in sharp ideological opposition to his wife.
JILL: . . . I only hope UNUTO is booted out of here before
they have abolished all fiestas in favour of discussion
groups and shows of those dreary little films about
inoculating babies and canning pineapples.
Others of his workers reveal their own prejudices as the two-act

play progresses – Melnik suggests that the only way to deal with
the radical nationalist Vezabar is to have him ‘liquidated’, and
Riberac accepts a bribe from Lerma, the Director of Pan-American
Alloys, who is also trying to get Fortrose to come and work for
him. We are led to believe that Vezabar wants his home island to
belong to and be governed by its own people, but then we discover
that he is on Lerma’s payroll. Fortrose discovers what Lerma has
known all along that the island is full of rare beryllium minerals,
from which his company can make an unimaginable fortune.
Fortrose reminds Lerma that the Corobanains will revolt against
his imposed mafiaesque regime, headed by Vezabar and that they
will eventually fight back, that given a choice they would rather
work with UNUTO. However, financial power and violence
prevail and Fortrose is murdered by Lerma’s henchman Vezabar
in the closing moments of the play.
Home is Tomorrow is a clear moral condemnation of the
dominance of economic imperatives over equality, although the
play is lacking the critique of colonisation which present-day
audiences would demand – the native islanders are either violent
or aspire to be like the colonisers. It is, however, a very progressive
play in its predictions of the heinous aspects of globalisation and
the increasingly questionable role of international government
organisations such as the United Nations. Priestley was, however,
criticised for never letting his characters ‘off duty’, their
construction always functioning to ideological argument (Hughes
1958: 206) in a play where he ‘telegraphs his plot-line’ (Evans
1964: 202). Atkins suggests that the ‘defeat of the international
ideal by political gangsterism’ does not solve the issues which
Priestley raises, but notes that these issues have a continuing
relevance (Atkins 1981: 221). Whatever the specifics of the
ideological questions which the play raises, it has in common with
122 Key plays
many of Priestley’s plays, whether utopian/dystopian or not, the
conviction that class or cultural division is no excuse for humanity
not to engage with and thrive upon the benefits of community as
opposed to individualism; albeit that the community may be
carved out of both a frustration with existing political structures
and an individual disquiet about one’s relationship to society at
large. The solidity and frequency of this conviction have given
his plays a continuing currency which Part III of this volume, by
examining a variety of his plays in production, explores.
Part III
Key plays/
productions
6 The Good Companions
J.B. Priestley’s 1929 novel The Good Companions created a whole

new public profile for the writer: it became a bestseller not long
after publication and found its way into the nation’s affections on
a level neither Priestley nor his publishers could ever have
predicted. As Priestley noted:
This idea of a picaresque long novel aroused about as much

enthusiasm as a stuffed walrus at an exhibition of water-
colours. The long novel was out of fashion, expensive to print,
hard to sell. The picaresque was out too, except perhaps as
an excuse for fancy dress.
Selling millions since original publication, The Good Companions

has also been adapted for the mainstream, for numerous small-
scale productions worldwide and for screen and for television,
with the original film, in 1933, launching the celluloid career of
the then sweetheart of the British musical stage, Jessie Matthews.
Both the novel and the various performative versions and adapta-
tions have, since 1929, found a continued cultural resonance with
audiences.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the British public were just
beginning to come to terms with the devastation, both emotional
and economic, of the First World War when the Wall Street Crash
in 1929 brought fears of economic depression and decline back
onto the agenda. The Good Companions, with its strongly
126 Key plays/productions
embedded sense of community and message of hope and opti-
mism, caught the zeitgeist and became the novel everyone was
talking about:
the total advance sale was only about 3,000 copies. The book
cost 10s. 6d., a stiff price for a novel in 1929 . . . we thought,
7,000 or even 8,000 might be sold. . . . The book came out
in July and for weeks nothing much happened. . . . Towards
Christmas the daily sale was more than the total advance had
been.
The success of The Good Companions was a mixed blessing

(Braine 1978; Cook 1997); Priestley was now perceived as a
‘bestseller’ and looked down upon by the highbrows (see Chapter
1), or bemoaned by popular readership because he had not
followed up the novel with another written in a similar vein:
people found it hard to accept that because he had written ‘one,
jolly, hearty, popular novel it does not follow that everything I
have written since ought to be exactly the same’ (Priestley 1940:
7–8). As Braine suggests, the novel ‘marked the emergence of
Priestley as a name and as a myth’, and to some extent the ‘myth’
of Priestley as merely a populist is still with us (Braine 1978: 26;
see also Baxendale 2001).
The Good Companions follows the fortunes of Miss Elizabeth
Trant, Jess Oakroyd and Inigo Jollifant as they go in search of
challenges beyond their previous everyday lived experiences. Miss
Trant, a spinster from the upper-middle classes, uses her inheri-
tance to fund her transition from the closeted and thankless life
she has led looking after her ailing and now deceased parent. Jess
Oakroyd is made redundant and decides to leave his unhappy
marriage and family life to seek work elsewhere in the South of
England. Inigo Jollifant, a teacher at a low-grade, old-fashioned
boarding school, volunteers to leave his employment when
castigated by the headmaster’s wife for illegally playing the piano
after hours. The three converge through their meeting up ‘on the
road’ and their engagement with the misfortunes of a travelling
concert party, The Dinkie Doos, who Miss Trant offers to bail
The Good Companions 127
out of debt and then manage. The company goes from strength
to strength, with Jess working as a stage manager and carpenter
and Inigo finding his voice as a composer. He also finds love in
the form of Susie Dean, the company’s ambitious and talented
lead singer-dancer. The story ends as Miss Trant refinds an old
flame who is now a doctor, Inigo finds success by selling his
compositions to a musical impresario in London, who also gives
Susie Dean a starring role in a London show singing his songs,
and Jess, after the death of his wife, sets off for a new life in
Canada with his emigrant daughter and newly born grandchild.
Such a brief outline of the plot does little to show the intricacy
and dynamic of the narrative, which is full of an extraordinary
range of characters – criminals, fairground workers, landladies,
salesmen, school teachers and solicitors as well as performers from
different generations and theatrical contexts. The novel is divided
into three parts, the first of which sees the main three characters
drawn from a diversity of class and geographical contexts,
brought together in the middle of England. Convergence through
diversity lies at the centre of the novel, which is predicated on the
idea that whatever their background, the characters are all in
search of something which will make them members of a self-
defined community. They have all lived isolated lives in pre-
determined contexts and through ‘making’ theatre they are
brought together, regardless of background, in pursuit of a
common goal.
The novel’s detailed descriptions of the landscape and its
inhabitants are echoed in Priestley’s journalistic tracts such as
English Journey (1934), which he called his ‘rambling but truthful
account’ of his observations of a journey through England in 1933
(Priestley 1934). The Good Companions gives a real sense of
England in the late 1920s and early 1930s: as Braine suggests, we
look at England through the characters (Braine 1978: 38). The
novel ends with an Epilogue ‘addressed to those who insist upon
having all the latest news’, and in this way Priestley simultaneously
acknowledges the appeal of the characters he has drawn and leaves
the text open to the possibility of a follow-up novel, which of
course was neither planned nor written; he is merely playing with
our desire to keep the characters alive in the active imagination.
Braine defines The Good Companions as almost the ‘arche-
typically well-made novel’ and suggests that Priestley here
manages to ‘combine complexity and richness with simplicity’
(Braine 1978: 29), whereas Atkins and others rather dismiss it
and construct its literary importance around the myth that it gave
Priestley financial stability for the rest of his career (see Atkins
1981; Klein 1988). The novel certainly gave him, in his mid-
thirties, an opportunity to further explore other forms of artistic
expression that were more financially precarious than journalism
– such as playwriting. The success of the novel and the subsequent
performative adaptations – both those actualised and those
planned but never made – indicates that The Good Companions,
centred on theatre as an enriching and community-building
experience, and has an archetypal character and appeal, the
various dynamics of which this chapter goes on to examine.
KEY PRODUCTIONS
Production I: The Good Companions, 1931

– from page to stage in the West End
The Priestley and Edward Knoblock stage adaptation ran at Her
Majesty’s theatre for over 300 performances. A very long
production run for its era, it was one of only three of his plays
which ran for over 300 performances in their original London
productions – the other two being Laburnum Grove (1933) and
The Linden Tree (1947). Although Priestley states that his ‘arrival’
in the ‘London Theatre’ came in 1932 with Dangerous Corner,
he had already been part of the team which created a hit in The
Good Companions in May 1931. The fact of the play’s success
would have given him both professional and economic immunity
from the ‘fastidious minority’ who so critiqued his populism in
writing the novel (Priestley 1977: 47), and a significant level of
marketability with West End managements. The play makes no
attempt to pander to limitations of location or casting and as such
would have been expensive to produce. The text has a similar
episodic quality to the novel and is divided into two acts and
fifteen scenes, demanding fourteen different sets on stage. Using
two real vehicles, a cast of thirty-seven plus numerous extras,
this was a large-scale production, the launching of which played
on the continuing success and popularity of the novel.
The text is multilayered and emphasises the geographical
landscape of the story. A greater percentage of the characters are
drawn in an in-depth manner than in the later film versions which
tended to focus on the central four, Oakroyd, Trant, Jollifant and
Dean. Some of the play-script does find its way into the 1933
Gaumont British version, but has a richer quality replaced in the
film by the different signifying possibilities of the medium. The
stage adaptation allows for a stronger development of characters
such as Mitcham, the well-travelled performer and conjurer or
the travelling salesmen and market people – Jackson, and
Linoleum Man and the Envelope Man – with whom Oakroyd
spends time before he meets up with Miss Trant in scene 6. The
stage adaptation maintains the textual variety of the novel,
making full use of regional accents and echoing the novel in
creating a very strong sense of the different characters through
which the story unfolds.
Inigo’s speech in which he decides to join the troupe towards
the end of Act I, scene 8, a turning point in the play, drives the
narrative forward and takes us from talk of action to action itself
in Act II, which focuses on the work of the troupe in rehearsal
and on tour.
INIGO: . . . I’m not sure what a trouper is, but I’m jolly glad
to know that I am a good one. If it means being a good
companion, then I’m proud to be called one – . . . there
isn’t too much – er – good companionship left in this
world, is there? Everybody – well, not everybody, but a
lot of people – are out for a good time – and that’s alright
of course. . . . But it’s nearly always their own good time
and nobody else’s they’re out after isn’t it? . . . An awful
lot of hard nuts about now.
(Priestley and Knoblock 1935: 47)
Figure 5 The Good Companions, His Majesty’s Theatre, London,

1931. Courtesy of the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre
Collection.
Not only does the speech find Inigo coincidentally formulating

the name for the troupe under Miss Trant’s management, but also
it states and confirms the political agenda behind the plot.
Whereas Gareth Lloyd Evans suggests that The Good Com-
panions is ‘in form’ a projection ‘from the basic concept of the
family circle as the seminal organisation for the perfect state’, it
is in fact more complex than this (Evans 1964: 21). The ‘family’
as created in the play is non-traditional and extended well beyond
the bounds of a functional family unit. Priestley is replacing
‘family’ with ‘community’ whereby members of the community
choose to be so, and choose to work toward a common goal. This
suggests that the text has an underlying radical agenda for which
Priestley is rarely given credit. Reviews of the production also
suggest that the sense of community reverberated with audiences,
many of whom would have come to see the play because of the
familiarity and cultural status of the novel.
Critical reception
Alone among civilised mankind I seem to be the only person
who has never read Mr Priestley’s celebrated novel. This
neglect brought its own punishment last night, when in the
theatre I sat feeling like a tragic outcast, or like one who finds
himself among a crowd of good people to none of whom he
has been introduced.
As every character familiar to those who have read the
book appeared on the stage there were shouts of delighted
greeting and happy recognition . . . so the play starts with the
enormous advantage of having a ready made public eager to
see their favourites step out of the printed page.1
I had no idea just what a classic ‘The Good Companions’
has become. Every character, every incident and every joke
were greeted by a rapturous audience like an old friend.2
Most of the production reviews are framed by the play’s original

form as a novel. Punch joked about the fight between Priestley
and Knoblock over which aspects of the novel to keep and which
to sacrifice, and suggested that the audience were not interested
in the play but merely in the relationship between the play and
the original novel.3 The reviewer for Time and Tide, a small
circulation journal aimed at the middle-class intelligentsia, warned
‘highbrows’ about the effusive theatricality of the piece.4 Other
reviewers critiqued the production as a poor play but a good stage
show, in other words, it was not the traditional fare defined as a
‘play’ but more like a musical comedy; critics did not know how
to place it.
The reviewer from The Times was less concerned with defini-
tion and more generously recognised that the form derived from
the content: ‘This is the theatre all out, and thank heaven for it;
there was never a better occasion for a strong whiff of grease paint,
an abundance of wise barnstorming and music to taste’. Ignoring
the populist appeal of the production, he equally praised the ‘firm,
rapid narrative’ and saw it as a ‘dashing piece of bravura’.5 Ivor
Brown, who was later to become a good friend of Priestley’s,
reviewed the play in terms of the fact that it ‘attempts no more
and achieves no less than’ entertains, reflecting the way in which
reviews of the play were overshadowed by critical agendas which
separated out ‘good plays’ and ‘good theatre’.6 That the pro-
duction was somehow the latter was seen in either negative or
rather patronising terms. Reviewers resentfully noted that the
production would have an extended run: resentment was a
reaction often inherent in the appraisal of much of Priestley’s work
– a rather perverse critical response to popular success.
Production II: from stage to screen –

The Good Companions, 1933 – Gaumont
British and Victor Saville
Following on from the phenomenal success of both the novel and
the stage version, Gaumont British bought the rights of The Good
Companions. ‘Talkies’ were still relatively new in 1933, and a
whole generation of audiences were still more familiar with the
idiosyncrasies of silent movies and the way meaning is created
visually rather than aurally. Nevertheless the film capitalised on
the success of the stage version, using Edmund Gwenn – a
celebrated stage actor who later worked in a number of Priestley
productions – as Oakroyd and the original stage Inigo Jollifant,
John Gielgud. After much searching Jessie Matthews was cast as
the rather hard-nosed and ambitious Susie Dean – and when
Priestley refused to ‘soften’ the role, she complained that he had
written Dean in such a way as to imply that he didn’t like women
(Thornton 1974: 101). Gaumont British had employed their
young ‘ace’ director Victor Saville to work on the film and invested
substantial amounts of time and money on scripting the adapta-
tion and screen-testing actors. Thornton (1974: 97) suggests that
as, ‘a property, The Good Companions was very much the
studio’s pièce de resistance’, an investment which subsequently
paid off at the box office.
Saville’s film plays on the geographic breadth of the novel: the
opening is framed by a map of England, the pieces of which are
removed like a puzzle to reveal the central characters and their
locations, Oakroyd in Bruddersford, Jollifant in the Fens and Miss
Trant in the Cotswolds. Each of the three are spoken to by an
invisible narrator, who opens the film with the statement that this
is a film about the ‘roads and the wandering players of England’.7
Bruddersford is visually signified through filmed sequences of
industrial buildings billowing out smoke, and mill workers at
work, then crowding through the factory gates on their way home,
to the sound of the noisy clickety-clack of the factory machinery.
In contrast, the camera sweeps across the sleepy Cotswolds where
the fields are full of peaceful and well-fed livestock. Throughout,
with shots of trains overlaid by changing bill posters advertising
‘The Good Companions’, we are reminded of the swift transitions
of the novel. The narrative is driven in part by the constant change
of location, the speed of which slows down as the film progresses
and we focus in on The Dinkie Doos/The Good Companions, at
the point at which the plot turns; as they move from struggle and
relative failure to success, so the landscape becomes more per-
manent. Saville makes use of montage and overlay and creates a
visual feast of England in the early 1930s, from the North West,
through the English Midlands to the glamour and bright lights of
London’s ‘theatreland’.
The script focuses on the romance between Susie Dean/Jollifant
and briefly, Miss Trant/Doctor McFarlane. Thus it attempts to
appeal to a 1930s female audience, now voters and professionals,
in a number of ways. Dean is ambitious and professional – she is
not only driven and independent but also romantic. Similarly,
Miss Trant chooses excitement and adventure when her father
dies and leaves her a small income: when her solicitor suggests
that she supplement her income by becoming a lady’s companion,
she refuses and tells him she is going to spend the money and set
off ‘into the blue’. These are portrayals of spirited women, who
are independent, adventurous, ambitious and romantic as well
as professional. Although Matthews had wanted Priestley to
soften her attitude to Jollifiant, Susie Dean comes across as mature
for her age and far less self-absorbed and self-centred than in the
stage and the later film version. Her relationship with Trant is as
colleague to colleague not simply boss and worker, and it is she
who brings Trant together with her former admirer McFarlane
towards the end of the film.
Saville’s 1933 film has a number of interesting performances,
from Gielgud, not a film actor at this point, but one who plays
Figure 6 The Good Companions, film directed by Victor Saville,

1933.
the lightness of Jollifant with a real command of comic timing,

and from Max Miller as Milbrau, the talent scout who speaks
faster than Jollifant can think. The film draws to a close with Susie
Dean dancing a short glitzy sequence – strangely reminiscent of
Josephine Baker – and starring in a West End review and then
ends by implying a further expanded geography, as Oakroyd sets
off to visit his daughter in Canada. Made at a point when the mass
film industry was still relatively new and open to experiment, The
Good Companions capitalises on the novel’s complexity of plots
and the centrality of its depiction of the changing landscape of
England in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Production III: The Good Companions

adapted – J. Lee Thompson’s 1957 film
J. Lee Thompson’s 1957 film of The Good Companions is the
most removed from the original of all the versions. Shown only
a few times on terrestrial television since its first release, and
hugely extravagant in the vein of 1950s British musicals, the film
was not as successful as the producers had hoped. Thompson, in
choosing to update the setting to the 1950s, loses many of the
subplots and creates little of the sense of the community so
prevalent in the original versions.
Thompson’s was one of less than a dozen British musical films
released in the 1950s, others of which, such as Val Guest’s
Expresso Bongo (1959), were more tuned in to the emerging post-
war, recently post-rationing youth culture. Conceived in 1953, but
not produced until significantly later, the context of production
and release is important. The film portrayed a different set of
‘cosier’ values not shared by young audiences of the 1950s, living
in a world very different from that of their parents.8 The destruc-
tion of the Second World War and the resulting threat of nuclear
war, the disappointment felt by many at the relative failure of the
post-war Labour landslide government and the emergence of a new
‘angry’ youth culture, meant that the film was shaped around an
imagined world which no longer had such cross-generational
appeal. However, as evidence of cultural history and of the ways
in which a text is adapted for screen, Thompson’s version of The
Good Companions offers an interesting range of possibilities.
The film centres on the rise to fame, through a combination of
hard work and romance, of Susie Dean. The part was originally
conceived by the studios for Audrey Hepburn, who was then
bought out of her contract by an American production company,
at which point the project was shelved for a few years. Once
revamped, the film starred Janette Scott as Dean,9 John Fraser as
Jollifant, Celia Johnson as Miss Trant and a host of young British
performers such as Anthony Newley, Rachel Roberts, Shirley-Ann
Field and Alec McCowan, who went on to make names for
themselves in British stage, film and television during the 1960s
and 1970s. With the removal of many of the subplots, the script
is weakened by its focus on the few: elder characters such as Miss
Trant/Celia Johnson are left with very little in the way of script.
This is a film about a youthful love affair and a performer, Susie
Dean, who is on the ascent.
The integration and disintegration of the performance troupe
is shown in a far more heightened way than any of the previous
adaptations, and although the film makes heavy use of the stage
as location – backstage, in the wings, in rehearsal and so on – the
finale, with its lavish song and dance numbers is filmed mostly
head-on and plays on filmic technique – the illusion of a stage
performance is almost entirely removed.
There is a visual acknowledgment of Priestley’s desire to move
the narrative around England – the film opens and is punctuated
by a steam train speeding along a track over an estuary in the
distance – but we are not given the sense of the breadth of the
geography of England so integral to the 1933 film version.
Thompson takes the troupe back to Bruddersford for the finale
and so Jess’s story comes full circle. Here he finds Mrs Oakroyd/
Thora Hird (dead at this point in the original), who at first
castigates him for working in a theatre troupe then changes her
mind and supportively joins in the scuffle on Susie’s benefit per-
formance night. Other characters are equally ‘re-formed’ in the
film. Lady Parlitt is no longer the stout aristocrat but a very
friendly and giggly Joyce Grenfell who, after her somewhat
incongruous marriage to Jerry Jerningham – young, athletic and
rather camp – saves the day by taking Jerningham, Dean and
Jollifant into her dead husband’s theatrical production company
and launching them in the West End.
Although the film has a very episodic structure with some thirty-
seven scenes, which are predominantly backstage, onstage or in
and around the theatre building, it loses the rhythm of the
previous versions in part because of the deletion of a number of
the subplots and the limiting of the geographical variety of either
the novel or the first stage and film versions. The film begins with
the assertion by a booking agent that The Dinkie Doos are old
fashioned – the manager of the Royal Theatre, somewhere in the
English Midlands, asks them if they have ‘ever ’eard of striptease,
rock and roll or the talking pictures’, and so sets up an expectation
of nostalgia. Thompson plays on a combination of traditional
popular performance styles and those more current in the 1950s
– so ‘Mitcham’s Magic Kitchen’ is juxtaposed to Rachel Robert’s
sexy cabaret solo played seductively to the camera towards the
end of the film, while Janette Scott’s finale performance is remini-
scent of the big song and dance numbers in films like Gigi. But
the attempt to recontextualise The Good Companions to the
1950s somehow failed, even with textual insertions such as
Milbrau’s ‘Anybody can write a concert, but it takes a composer
to write a pop!’ The film loses both the novel and stage versions’
sense of community built and sustained and replaces it with an
attempted focus on youth culture and romance.
Production IV: The Good Companions

adapted – Previn and Mercer – the 1974
musical
I was not concerned directly with The Good Companions as
a musical . . . but of course I took a semi-paternalistic interest
in it. The music and lyrics by André Previn and Johnny Mercer
seemed to me . . . very good indeed, quite exceptional; and if
they were coolly received by some sections of the press, I think
it was because it was thought that two Americans shouldn’t
be involved in our very English Good Companions. After
playing to enormous money at Her Majesty’s for some
months, it began to slip during the lean weeks after Christmas
and was then whipped off to make room for another musical
that proved to be a disaster. Had it been nursed for a few
more weeks – as many a long-running musical has been – it
would not only have run on and on but would also have been
presented overseas. It remains in my mind as an ambitious
and loveable musical that deserved more loyalty from its
management.
(Priestley 1977: 79–80)
Previn and Mercer’s 1974 musical, starring Judi Dench, John Mills
– surprising critics with the agility of his show-stopping tap dance
in the latter stages of his career – and Christopher Gable,10 was an
attempt to find ‘a style for a British musical which is successful and
entertaining but . . . not in any way an attempt to emulate the
American shows’.11 Although a critical success and playing to full
houses, costs could not be overcome by the small post-Christmas
audiences and the management were not prepared to invest for a
long run. Thus, even in the 1970s Priestley’s earlier criticism of the
management structures within the industry still had relevance.
With lyrics by Johnny Mercer, who had penned such hits as Moon
River and Fools Rush In, and music by André Previn, the then
conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, the production
was directed by Braham Murray, an up-and-coming ex-Oxbridge
director. Priestley was involved from a distance in the production
and was unhappy with various aspects, such as the detraction from
the three main characters caused by the opening song and dance
numbers. He did not like the casting of Susie Dean and felt that
the actress Marti Webb was ‘short of feminine charm’.12 Priestley
was in his eighties when this production was mounted and
although Ronald Harwood, who had written the ‘book’ for the
production, was a friend, the tone of Priestley’s correspondence
around the production process is marked by his sense that his
advice wasn’t quite being taken seriously. Interestingly, reminiscent
of the opening shots of the 1933 film, he wanted a large map of
England to be the first thing the audience saw. Although the
Previn/Mercer production was largely faithful to the novel, using
the temporal setting of the late 1920s and early 1930s, promoting
the importance of the troupe and its community with such opening
numbers as ‘Camaraderie’, ‘We haven’t got a tuppenny piece to
buy a cup of tea, but we’ve got – camararderie!’,13 it was created
by a young team, few of whom would have shared Priestley’s
experience of the era of the original.
The production ran for half a year and was well received by
critics, who to some extent shared the perception of The Good
Companions as sentimental and nostalgic. Although a number
commented upon the ways in which the success of the novel had
reverberated through British culture over some forty years and
beyond. Although less successful, Alan Plater – credited with
numerous British television hits from the 1960s onwards –
adapted the novel into a nine part series for ITV in 1980. For
Priestley the story had remained so popular because it was a ‘fairy
story’ which comes right in the end, but one which was written
with a background which was ‘one hundred percent accurate’.
The appeal of The Good Companions must also be accredited to
its creation of a self-defined and inclusive community which
struggles against adversity, a community focused on maintaining
‘a great rapport between audience and performers’.14
7 An Inspector Calls
During 1945 Priestley campaigned vigorously for the Labour

Party, although he himself had stood unsuccessfully as an
Independent candidate in a Conservative stronghold (Brome
1988: 281–2). His socialist belief – non-politically party specific
– in the need for post-war social reconstruction is mapped directly
on to the First World War (1912) setting of An Inspector Calls.
One of Priestley’s best known and most popular plays, it is a
political parable where the social and ideological concerns facing
the contemporary post Second World War audience are located
inside a historical setting.
BIRLING: We employers at last are coming together to see

that our interests – and the interests of Capital –
are properly protected. And we are in for a time of
steadily increasing prosperity . . . And I say there isn’t a
chance of war. The world’s developing so fast that it’ll
make war impossible. . . . We can’t let these Bernard
Shaws and H.G. Wellses do all the talking. We hard-
headed practical business men . . . we’ve had experience
– and we know.
(Priestley 1994: 165–6)
INSPECTOR GOOLE: . . . there are millions . . . with their

lives . . . all intertwined with our lives, with what we
think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are
members of one body. We are responsible for each other.
And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men
will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in
fire and blood and anguish.
Priestley plays on the word ‘ghoul’: for Goole haunts the Birlings,
refusing to let them forget their past actions and forcing them to
take responsibility for their effect on those from whom they have
been socially isolated. Inspector Goole is drawn in overt
ideological contrast to Birling, who espouses individualism: ‘a
man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his
own’ (Priestley 1994: 168) places him at the opposite end of the
ideological spectrum. The anti-capitalist perspective of the play
was not new in Priestley’s work; in earlier plays such as Cornelius
(1935) and Bees on the Boat Deck (1936) he had directly
questioned the ethics of capitalism as an economic framework
(see Chapter 5). But it was in his plays of the 1940s, and especially
in An Inspector Calls – a deceptively conservative one-set, well-
made play, where the action all takes place over one evening –
that Priestley most clearly stated his humanist and socialist ethics.
The play is set in 1912, a week before the sinking of the Titanic,
a ship which for successful industrial manufacturer Mr Birling
signifies the height of technical advances capitalism has made. The
temporal setting is a device, so that we are taken back to the
Edwardian period in order to show us that the social and moral
choices made in the present, 1945, are not dissimilar to those
which Goole makes the Birlings face up to in the imagined past.
Birling refuses to accept the inevitability of war in Europe, while
the premiere audience would have just emerged from the throes
of the 1939–45 war and may equally have lived through the
1914–18 war which Birling is so insistent, in 1912, could never
happen. All the action takes place in one location, the Birlings’
dining room which they occasionally exit but which we, the
audience, never leave. We hear about the outside world, but the
physical world in which the characters operate becomes, as the
play develops, more distant from it. The central ‘character’ of
the ‘single mother’ Eva Smith, around which the plot unfolds,
enters the stage world only through the inspector’s revelations
An Inspector Calls 141
about her life and the Birlings’ role in her tragic demise – we never
see her.
The play opens as Birling and his family are seated around their
dining table, having finished a meal in celebration of Sheila
Birling’s engagement to Gerald Croft. Mr Birling expresses his
excitement that his daughter’s engagement brings together the two
successful business families – the Crofts represent an established
and moneyed upper-middle-class ‘old county’ family. Birling’s
‘festive fat forecasts’ (Klein 1988: 201) inform his daughter and
future son-in-law that by 1940 they will be living in a world which
has ‘forgotten all these Capital versus Labour agitations and all
these silly little war scares’ (Priestley 1994: 166). He is clearly
drawn by Priestley as a man who, from the perspective of an
audience in the mid-1940s, is in denial about the realities of world
affairs.
The celebration turns sour when Inspector Goole arrives and
begins his inquiry on the family’s involvement with Eva Smith
who, according to the inspector, has committed suicide by
swallowing strong disinfectant. Slowly the family are all shown
to have had a significant relationship with this woman: Birling
was her employer until he dismissed her because of her suspected
role in strike action and Sheila had her dismissed from the shop
where she had found work, because she thought her impertinent.
We then discover that Gerald had met Eva Smith, who by then
had changed her name to Daisy Renton, and had befriended her,
letting her live in his friend’s flat and giving her money. The
friendship turned into a romance and when Croft eventually broke
off the affair, Eva then became involved with Eric Birling and
found herself pregnant with his child. When she then went to the
local charitable board to ask for financial assistance, her request
was turned down by Mrs Birling – chairwoman of the organ-
isation – who took a dislike to her, believing Eva had given herself
‘ridiculous airs’ (Priestley 1994: 199) by refusing to accept money
or marry the father of her child. Through the inspector’s ques-
tioning, the whole family become implicated in the girl’s suicide,
but all except Sheila and Eric refuse any responsibility for this.
By the end of Act II Mrs Birling has realised that the man most
implicated is her own son: that he stole money to support Eva and
that she has unwittingly suggested that he be publicly punished for
doing so. In Act III Gerald tries to reverse the story when he finds
out that Goole, who by now has given his last speech and left, is
neither an inspector nor an employee of any law enforcement
agency, and that the hospital have not admitted any suicide cases
that day. At this point we see the reinforcement of the generational
split, the beginnings of which were visible from the opening of the
play: Sheila and Eric Birling feel responsible and are shocked by
their parents’ lack of sympathy for Eva. Sheila can’t believe that
they are acting as if nothing has happened: ‘Everything we said
had happened really had happened. If it didn’t end tragically, then
that’s lucky for us. But it might have done’ (Priestley 1994: 219).
The final slant happens right at the end of the play when Birling,
busy telling them all that the inspector was a hoax and there is
nothing to worry about, takes a phone call in which he is told that
a girl has died on her way to the hospital having swallowed
disinfectant and that an inspector is on his way to begin his
inquiries. Thus the play ends by returning to the beginning of the
plot. Priestley’s circularity implies that we are being taken back to
the beginning of Eva’s story in order that the Birlings might once
again be made to take responsibility for their social actions.
Critical reception
Although the play has gained more cultural significance in later
years, it was not one of Priestley’s most successful with British
theatre audiences when it was first produced in 1946. Critics such
as Ivor Brown (1957) hardly mention it, whereas others point to
the criticism that
it was no surprise to the audience to know Inspector Goole

did not exist. They had known all the time that it was
Inspector Priestley . . . the danger lurking in the play – [is]
that it may become a lecture in Civics by the author.
(Pogson 1947: 48–9)
Although some literary critics judged it to be one of Priestley’s

‘tautest, best constructed dramas’, they felt that he ‘awkwardly
injected the play with contemporary relevance’ and preached at
the audience, no longer trusting their ‘intellect or intuition’
(DeVitis and Kalson 1980: 200–4). Other critics took a more
positive attitude to the play and noted a similarity with Dangerous
Corner (1932), his earlier play which made use of the thriller/
detective trope (see Chapter 3), but felt that with An Inspector
Calls, Priestley ‘cut hard with a knife’ in order to implicate the
audience as well as the fictional characters (Hughes 1958: 199).
For Evans (1964: 184) the play was the ‘clearest expression’ of
‘Priestley’s belief that “no man is an island” – the theme is guilt
and social responsibility’. Atkins (1981), however, has commented
that the play was
so well constructed and at the same time bears such a deeply

felt social observation, where a fundamental realism is
tempered by just the right degree of mystery and symbolism,
that it is hard to fault the play in any way.
(Atkins 1981: 217)
Similarly, other more conservative writers like Noël Coward

admired the play’s construction and its surprise ending.1
Considering the play’s production history, it has received
remarkably little attention from literary critics or theatre his-
torians: this is in part a response to its perceived simplicity. But
its simplicity is rather deceptive: Priestley not only makes use of
the detective formula but also plays with our sense of time and
reality. He creates a central character who never appears and
whose existence we are encouraged to dispute in Act III of the
play. An Inspector Calls seems to have suffered until recently in
Britain from its origins as a text deeply embedded within a form
of socialist ideology which was informing radical thinkers in the
1940s: most of the criticisms of the play, even those made by his
colleagues, were based on the fact that Priestley had supposedly
used it as an opportunity to ‘preach politics’. Priestley, like many
other left-wing writers during the period in which the play was
conceived, wanted a social and political shift which took Britain
forward to a society based on equality and community after the
Second World War, not backwards to the class-ridden society of
the Edwardian period. That this belief is reflected in the play has
not stopped it from being performed on a surprisingly continuous
basis, all over the world since the mid-1940s. It may also be the
precise reason for its relative critical neglect. As John Braine has
pointed out, ‘audiences have not found it difficult’ as a play
(Braine 1978:115).
KEY PRODUCTIONS
Production I: Tairov at the Kamerny

Theatre, Moscow, 1945
Alexander Tairov was one of Russia’s foremost directors, founder
and ‘chief director of the Kamerny (Chamber) Theatre in Moscow
from 1914–1949’ (Worrall 1989: 15). Worrall places him
alongside Diaghilev and Meyerhold in terms of his contribution
to ‘theatrical “modernism” in Russia’ (Worrall 1989: 3). Tairov’s
reputation was founded not only on his aesthetic experiments in
state-funded Russian theatres, but also on the basis that he
promoted Western European and American drama in Russia.
Having directed Priestley’s Dangerous Corner in 1940, he turned
to An Inspector Calls in 1945 as part of his search for the ‘best
of the most “progressive works” of world drama’ (Worrall 1989:
71). He directed the play with his associate L. Luk’yanov.
Priestley’s reputation in Russia had been strengthened by
productions of Dangerous Corner and Time and the Conways,
but his very ‘definite anti-fascist position during the war, his
radio talks, in which he showed himself a passionate advocate
of the United Nation’s cause’, also enhanced his authority and
popularity there (Drieden 1945: 25). British relations with Russia
were politically strained but Priestley was one of a group of
British writers and intellectuals who actively engaged with a
process of promoting understanding between the two nations (see
Priestley 1946). Unable to find a London venue for the play, An
Inspector Calls (renamed He Has Arrived) received its premiere
in a communist Russia barely out of the turmoil of the Second
World War.
Figure 7 An Inspector Calls, directed by Alexander Tairov, Kamerny

Theatre, Moscow, 1945. By kind permission of the J.B.
Priestley Collection, The University of Bradford, from a
commemorative album of the Priestleys’ visit to Russia in
1946.
The Tairov production set the mode of design for the later
London production:
The directors and the artist E. Kovalenko emphasised the

significance of the image of Goole on the first appearance of
the inspector on stage. In the big room of the Birlings’ flat, it
was semi-dark and only the table at which they were gathered
on the occasion of the daughter’s engagement was brightly
lit. But Goole comes in and the whole room becomes lighter,
the footlights get brighter and brighter, illuminating all the
corners of the stage space, and the light, intensifying, takes
on shades of flame, the scarlet colour of retribution, the colour
of anger and fire.
(Golovashenko 1970: 138)
Tairov used the device which director Stephen Daldry was later
to employ and develop, namely, Inspector Goole’s costume was
from the 1940s not the Edwardian period: he chose not to ‘adhere

1946.
to the literal concreteness of time and action’. This was done in

order to show that ‘those social conflicts which the drama and the
destruction of Eva Smith have defined remain part of our culture’
(Golovashenko 1970: 138, 139): Tairov wanted to use Goole’s
costume as a means of signifying a clear connection between the
social and political choices of 1912 and those of 1945. The
Birlings’ dining room table dominated the scenic space; for Tairov,
Priestley had ‘seated a whole world around a dinner-table, while
in the destinies of each person he makes you feel the breath of
larger social strata, societies and states’ (Drieden 1945: 25).
Tairov’s An Inspector Calls was not a detective play but a
‘psychological play about morality, conscience, addressed to
“ordinary” people’ (Drieden 1945: 25). Goole was the inspector
of the ‘human conscience’. He becomes a judge in what Russian
critic Boyadzhiev saw as the ‘court-room’/bourgeois dining room
within the Birlings’ home:

1946.
The external aspect of the production, the movement of the

action itself can be interpreted as a strict and impartial court.
The manorial dining room of the Birlings is transformed
under our gaze into a . . . court-room. The table standing in
the middle of the room is almost an executioner’s block and
the four chairs arranged at the sides, the defendants’ benches.
The course of the court is inexorable. One by one the guilty
stand up and confess to their crimes, and each time the
directors find a bright expressive arrangement dictated by the
internal dramatic state of action. The mise en scene of this
production is a model of theatrical plastic art.
(Golovashenko 1970: 139)
Tairov’s interpretation was very much in accord with post-war

Russian socialist thinking: Goole was not a representative of the
state apparatus but rather the ‘voice of the people’; yet Goole
remains a complex figure, ‘not simply the accuser’. He did not
only ‘expose, but . . . also suffered from the fact that people are
imperfect, that the world in which he lives is so unjust and cruel’.
The actor playing the inspector was required to portray a man of
‘great humanism – demanding and impassioned’: for Tairov,
Goole had come to the Birlings’ from the wider ‘strata of society
– like a democrat, like a socialist’ (Golovashenko 1970: 139).
Production II: The Old Vic – the London

premiere, 1946
The first London production of An Inspector Calls ran for fewer
than 50 performances: this is in contrast to the first production
of the play in post-war Germany, which ran for over 1600.
Priestley notes this production without giving any detail, only to
mention that he received negligible royalties (Priestley 1962: 195).
One should, however, note the different reactions of post-war
audiences to the play: the English were less moved by the proposal
that the individual take responsibility for their actions than the
Germans.
The 1946 London production was part of the first season of the
post-war Old Vic theatre company, funded in part by the relatively
new Arts Council of Great Britain and managed by John Burrell,
Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. Produced in conjunction
with the Joint Council of the National Theatre, the play became
embedded in a post-war initiative to construct a proto National
Theatre organisation (see Guthrie 1987). Staged at the New
Theatre, the production was the last by Priestley to be directed
by Basil Dean, and starred Ralph Richardson and Alec Guinness.
For Priestley it was a ‘star-studded’ performance, but the ‘stars’
did not find it an easy production to work on (Priestley 1977: 79).
Richardson and Dean, with the distance of war as an interruption
to their professional relationship, no longer found it easy to work
with one another, despite the fact that they had worked together
on a number of Priestley plays previously (Clough 1989: 203;
Dean 1973: 271). Equally, the relationship between Richardson
and Guinness became strained (Guinness 1986: 270), but this was
not the reason for the production’s destiny of relative historical
obscurity.
Dean realised that the Moscow production was more aestheti-
cally ‘adventurous’ than either he or, so he thought, English
audiences would be used to but noted that Tairov’s had been an
‘impressionistic production, which the author regarded more
favourably than [his] realistic one’; he felt that the ‘war-torn’
London theatre was not ‘in the mood for such presentation’ (Dean
1973: 271). Priestley’s own stage directions at the beginning of
the printed play text – published after the London production –
go some way toward suggesting how the set might have looked
in the original production: he states that the set, if realistic, ‘should
be swung back’ and the dining table moved during each act
(Priestley 1994: 161). Stephen Daldry and his designer Ian
MacNeil have suggested that in fact it was the stage manager of
the original production who came up with the idea rather than
Priestley or Dean.2 Either way, the production team tried to solve
the scenographic challenge of changing the audience’s perspective
of the dining room, which the Tairov production had managed
to raise and solve earlier. Dean’s own description of what he
considered the innovative element of the production gives the
clearest picture.
We did, however, introduce one novel idea into the produc-

tion. The action takes place in the dining room of a middle-
class house of the industrial Midlands in the year 1912. In
order to give some variety to the grouping of what was
basically a static play, the characters, the scenery and furni-
ture were rearranged after each act, so that the audience saw
the room from a different angle. Thus an actor who was
facing the audience at the end of one act might find himself
turned away from them at the beginning of the next. This was
Priestley’s idea; it proved extraordinarily difficult to work out
in detail, since the relative positions of all the actors had to
be adjusted for each act to conform to the audience’s different
viewpoint.
(Dean 1973: 271)
This intriguing scenographic strategy allows for predetermined

differentials in terms of visual angles and focus in much the same
way as a film might do. The audience’s perspective is literally
guided by the manipulation of the elements which go together to
create the internal aspects of the set: the furniture and some of the
flats are moved, to make it seem as if you are seeing the room
from a different position. Dean indicates that this was problematic
and Priestley’s later response in the printed version of the play
was that if such a strategy proves too difficult then the director
should ‘dispense with an ordinary realistic set’ altogether (Priestley
1994:161). Priestley recognised in 1946 that the play presented
the kind of radical aesthetic challenge which Daldry took up over
forty years later. Whether the idea worked in practice or not, it
was clearly inspired by Tairov’s centralising of the dining table
and all that it could be expected to signify in theatrical terms.
Reviews also suggest that Kathleen Anker’s design with its ‘claret-
hued’ wallpaper,3 and dark red and mahogany colour scheme, the
‘prophetically coloured dark red with the congealed blood of
future wars’,4 also mirrored the tone of the Tairov production.
Critical reception
The London production represented the only contemporary
drama in the Old Vic season of 1946 and a number of the critics
framed it in this context. John Allen welcomed the new production
as part of the valuable work that the Old Vic company was
undertaking, in terms of the ‘inception of big developments in
the theatre’.5 The Old Vic incentive, one of the first to receive
government subsidy, was seen as representing the beginnings of
an attempt to establish a ‘national’ theatre removed from the
commercial management system, and it was seen as a testimonial
to Priestley’s achievements that he should be part of this process.
Allen, along with a number of other critics and reviewers, made
connections between Priestley’s Dangerous Corner and An
Inspector Calls, not only because of the thriller/detective element
at the centre of the plot, but also because of the portrayal of the
comfortable middle class in crisis. For Allen it was ultimately a
‘morality . . . raised . . . above the level of the tea-cup drama by
the most subtle intensity of writing’.6 Stephen Potter (writing in
the New Statesman) gave a similarly positive response, feeling that
the ‘contemporary moral’, contrary to the views of those who had
received the production less favourably, had been kept at a
distance through the setting of the action in 1912.7 In contrast
Lionel Hale felt that the Edwardian setting was an ‘indication of
the play’s lack of theatrical truth’.8 This is in line with many of
the negative reviews of the production which focused on the
politics of the piece and the ways in which Priestley was seen to
be proselytising left-wing politics to a theatre audience hungry for
entertainment. The reviewer for The Times opened his review with
the following:
Bang! Bang! Mr. Priestley lets drive with both barrels. If the
purse-proud individualists who overlook their responsibilities
to the rest of the human family are not brought down on the
plane of realism they can hardly hope to escape him on the
plane of fantasy.9
Critical reactions to the play, to some extent, reveal the ideological

bias of the reviewers, many of whom were aligned more to the
political right than left. For James Agate, the play lacked action:
everything that ‘happens takes place before the play begins’, it
was ‘a modern morality in which nobody does anything except
talk’.10 J.C. Trewin noted what he saw as Priestley’s sermonising,
and that there was a lack of clarity as to what the inspector was
supposed to represent: ‘He may be an embodiment of Conscience
or the representative of a celestial Watch Committee’ – either way
he felt that the play, even though short, could have been halved
in length and that Priestley’s portrayal of the Birlings represented
a ‘prolonged clatter of skeletons’. For Trewin, the play dealt with
issues that were no longer relevant.11
There is no other Priestley play for which the initial critical
reactions were so clearly split between the political left and the
political right. Priestley felt that the original London production
had been given a largely unenthusiastic reception in 1946, because
the ‘selfishness and callousness’ which the text explores was less
evident or topical in the immediate post-war setting. The British
people, still living under the limitations of food and goods
rationing, had pulled together as a community during the war
(Priestley 1973: 79). Yet the play was warmly received in other
countries – for example Russia and Germany – where post-war
economics meant that everyday social conditions were worse
those in Britain. What Priestley saw as a ‘cool, almost hostile
reception’ (Priestley 1962: 195) by the critics, arguably had far
more to do with the shift in the British political scene than it did
the audience’s acceptance of the ideological stance of the play.
The cultural anxiety embedded for the political right in the
outcome of the landslide Labour victory of 1945 foregrounded
the distinctions between what was considered to be political left
and right in public discourse. Although the movement of wartime
radicalism, in which Priestley had played a significant role, was
‘never really fully exploited’ (McKibbin 2000: 534), at the time
of the original production, there was a heightened sensitivity
towards what was seen as ‘leftism’. Stephen Potter summarised
the relationship of this sensitivity to the reception of An Inspector
Calls with the most accuracy.
It was a shock after enjoying the play at the New Theatre . . .

to find that I ought not to have been so pleased with it after
all. A friend told me it was all politics, a critic that Ralph
Richardson was the mouthpiece of the author, somebody else
that it was a pity that for this occasion Mr. Priestley had
changed down to low gear and was grinding away again. . . .
[S]urely it was the critic, and not Mr. Priestley, who was being
politically minded when he dissected the play in the brutal
modern manner, by splitting it into Left and Right.12
Production III: The Celluloid Inspector, 1954

Produced by Priestley’s agent A.D. Peters and directed by Guy
Hamilton, the 1954 film version of An Inspector Calls starred the
well-loved character actor Alastair Sim as Inspector Poole (note
the change in name).13 Released by British Lion Films, Hamilton’s
film created mass circulation for An Inspector Calls which had
previously been seen only by limited theatre audiences in Britain.
Recently digitised, it was successful at the time of release but has
also been screened many times since on terrestrial and cable
television (Sierz 1999: 239). Despite the change of name to Poole,
the celluloid inspector takes on more overtly ‘other worldly’
characteristics than in the stage version. He does not enter,
announced by the maid, through the front door, but rather,
through the open French windows while the Birlings are mid-
conversation. Similarly, he does not leave through the front door,
but merely disappears from the room in which the Birlings have
left him: all that remains of his presence is the gentle rocking of
the chair in which he has been sitting. Poole consults his pocket
watch very deliberately on a number of occasions, as if he is
expecting the next event in the plot to take place at a specified
time, as if he has already seen the future. His manner, although
facially melodramatic – raising his eyebrows and manipulating
his facial muscles without subtlety – is physically relaxed. He waits
patiently for the family to cooperate while sitting on the chair: he
takes command of the space, gently refusing to move or leave
when asked.
The film focuses heavily on facial gestures and reactions while
at the same time the actors have a very contemporary physicality.
Figure 10 An Inspector Calls, film directed by Guy Hamilton, 1954.

Brian Forbes as Eric Birling and Eileen Moore as Sheila Birling
have more in common with young lead actors in a film with a
contemporary setting than they do with actors in a period piece:
Forbes moves like a young rebel, leading with the head and
holding his cigarette between two fingers and thumb and Moore’s
hairstyle and low-cut, off-the-shoulder dress place them both
firmly in the 1950s. The camera shots in the confessional scenes
all focus on the upper third of the body, honing in on facial
reactions whenever possible.
In this way the characters’ emotional responses are spelled out
for the audience, as is the story, whereby scenes only described in
the play are actually realised in the film. Thus, Eva Smith, who
never actually appears in the stage version, is a strong presence
in the film, where she is shown working at the factory, and at the
milliners, socialising in the variety hall, living in Croft’s flat,
petitioning Mrs Birling’s charitable organisation for money and
finally, in a seedy rented room with Eric Birling. Making Smith
visible removes her ‘every-woman status’ so prevalent in the play,
at the same time as making more real her ordeal and the family’s
role in her final destiny. Similarly the visual distinction between
the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is given more emphasis in the film.
Eva Smith’s clothes are simple and plain throughout, while the
Birling women dress luxuriously in fitting with their velvet and
brocade, high-ceilinged and ornate home setting. The film also
stresses class distinctions in setting – the factory floor is juxtaposed
with the factory office; the bar of the variety hall with the tasteful
modernity of Gerald Croft’s bachelor flat; the austerity of the hall
in which Mrs Birling’s charity holds its ‘hearings’ with the over-
stuffed comfort of the Birlings’ dining room. Guy Hamilton draws
out the dramaturgical tensions of the play through the visual
possibilities of the film medium and in doing so loses some of the
subtlety of the text: the audience ‘read’ the text through the visual
rather than visualising through their imaginations, the position
of the text in terms of its storytelling potential has shifted – the
film was made for a broader spectrum of classes, a popular
audience not a theatre one. For Hughes, the film ‘gave the public
a “good thriller” but dissipated the intensity and removed the
peculiar quality of the play’, a rather dismissive response, which
reveals assumptions about the capacity of film to signify as force-
fully as a play text (Hughes 1958: 200).
The dining table, however, remains central, with the opening
shots of the film showing us only the table and the food left over
from the celebratory meal, rather than the bodies of the people
whose conversations we can hear. The Birlings’ accents clearly
place them among the upper-middle classes of middle England,
in contrast to the ‘working-class’ accents of Eva Smith and her
co-workers or the Birlings’ maid who speaks only at the end of
the film.
Sierz (1999) has suggested that when originally released and
through subsequent screenings, the film created a ‘cultural
penetration’ which the stage version had not achieved at the time,
and that its naturalistic style meant that one of the key issues
around which the play is built, that of class difference, is shown
as ‘fixed’ and as ‘natural’ (Sierz 1999: 242). To some extent this
is true, but the script was not adapted so heavily that the issue of
class is removed from the film, nor is a hierarchy of class difference
quite as naturalised as Sierz suggests. Rather, the inclusion of
Eva Smith as an actual onscreen body and the division of genera-
tions in terms of their change in attitudes during and after the
inspector’s visit, suggest that some sort of moral and cultural shift
has taken place. The shame and genuine regret of the younger
generation, grouped in close proximity to one another, is clearly
pitted against the stubborn refusal of Mr and Mrs Birling to take
any responsibility for Smith’s tragic end. Croft, the capitalist
businessman, stands away from his former fiancé Sheila, and
moves towards the older generation in his attempts to remove any
sense of real crisis in the class order.
Production IV: Stephen Daldry’s An

Inspector Calls – The National Theatre
and beyond, 1992
Genesis, context and history

It is difficult to separate out the National Theatre’s 1992 pro-
duction of An Inspector Calls from either its subsequent history
as a West End and touring event or from the relationship between
the production and its director Stephen Daldry. The production
had an earlier manifestation at the York Theatre Royal, but it was
the London production, in a mainstream subsidised theatre with
a substantial budget, which brought to fruition the scenographic
ideas Daldry wanted to place onto the text. Artistic director of
the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, London, a theatre with a long
history of experimental, non-commercial work, from 1989 to
1992, Daldry was seen by Richard Eyre – the then artistic director
of the National Theatre – as someone with fresh ideas who was
unafraid of ‘difficult’ texts. Having worked with European plays
at the Gate as well as directing many plays in the regions while
working for example at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, Daldry
had a growing reputation as the wunderkind of the British theatre
at a time when an injection of ‘new’ talent was much needed. By
1992 Daldry had already been given the job of Artistic Director
of the Royal Court but was offered a slot in the National Theatre
season during a period of hand-over from the outgoing Artistic
Director of the Royal Court, Max Stafford-Clark. The Royal
Court was known as the hot-bed of new writing and so the choice
of Daldry, with a reputation for reworking marginal or classical
texts, was an interesting one. Equally, Eyre was surprised by
Daldry’s choice of An Inspector Calls: a play popular with
amateur companies, which had been part of the English school
syllabus for some years, not obviously experimental and rather
outdated (Eyre 2003: 181; see also Daldry 1993: 7). For Daldry,
however, this was an ideal scenario, a play with which he could
exploit his talent for ‘[t]aking the normally small and making it
huge’ (Lesser 1997: 46), with a ready-made and potentially
lucrative audience and a theatre which had given him an artistic
carte blanche.
All the interviews and publicity around the production identify
Daldry’s desire to revamp the play, or at least to reinvest in its
potential as a piece of exciting theatre. He saw Priestley as ‘a
radical playwright who was trying to break the mould and
reinvent theatre for moral purposes’.14 He also had a very strong
political impetus for wanting to work with the play: namely that
it questions our roles as individuals within any given society. At
this point in British history, a whole generation under Margaret
Thatcher’s Conservative government had been encouraged to
believe that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and that contrary
to Priestley’s edict in the play, they were not part of a collective
society but isolated individuals. Just as Priestley used the setting
of 1912 to force the issue of social reconstruction for a post-war
audience, so Daldry saw parallels between the mid-1940s and
the political choices which were available in early 1990s Britain:
the Thatcher years had bought with them the dismantling of much
of the radical and socially democratic thinking which had been
part of the vision of 1945.
There is a generation that has no inkling of that romantic

vision of creating a better society. They have been told that
we live for ourselves and are not responsible for each other.
I wanted to do a play that challenges that . . . when political
drama seems to lack vision for humanity, it seemed important
to hear a powerful voice from 1945 saying they also had a
choice between the individual and society. I think Priestley
would have been outraged now to see people on the streets.15
Daldry wanted to ‘reclaim’ the text, ‘to restore Priestley’s original

politics’ (Sierz 1999: 241), and saw the play as controversial,
rather than an outdated period piece lacking theatrical chal-
lenges. What he and his team – which included the designer
Ian MacNeil and composer Stephen Warbeck – achieved was to
create a production which managed to explore issues of social
responsibility at the same time as providing visual spectacle and
a sophisticated reading of the original Priestley play: the set com-
bined the expressionistic and the spectacular with the ideologically
reflective.
The production has an extraordinary history: opening in the
Lyttelton at the National Theatre in 1992, it transferred to the
Olivier at the National in January 1993 and then into the West
End commercial sector at the Aldwych from 1993 to 1995, then
in 1995 at the Garrick Theatre and in 2001 to the Playhouse,
where it closed in May 2002, although it was still on a national
tour of England in 2005.16 The American premiere of Daldry’s
production in New York in 1994 not only saw the number of
awards given to Daldry and his team increase to nineteen, but also
represented an unusual success story for a transfer from a British
subsidised theatre to the American commercial market. In fact the
production has an unmatched historical significance because of
the fact that, despite being a revival of an ‘old’ play and not a
musical, it ran for so long in the West End, on national and
international tour and has as a result become a kind of theatrical
phenomenon. Matthew Sweet has noted that as ‘Priestley’s clarion
call for the redistribution of wealth’, the play was one of the West
End’s ‘least likely long-distance runners’. Similarly he suggested
that the production sustained its popularity because, as the
political climate changed so the play ‘yielded to different political
priorities’, that Daldry had created a ‘call to arms’ for a 1990s
audience, similar to the way in which Priestley was attuned to
the ‘utopianism of Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government’
and the British audience of 1946.17 That the original London
production did not find an extended audience for the play in 1946
makes the success of Daldry’s production even more extra-
ordinary: he created a revisionist version of the play which not
only changed his own career, but also re-placed Priestley on the
theatrical map. The production was visually stunning and
innovative, the text was removed from any notion of a realist
framework, the musical score functioned as a score works in film
– underpinning and at times driving the action on stage. He kept
textual alterations to a minimum then shifted the whole theatrical
framework for the realisation of it.
Realisation: a political theatrical

spectacular
The contextual framework for the production gave Daldry the
financial and artistic freedom to explore ideas originally tried out
in the York Theatre Royal production in the late 1980s. Daldry’s
concept for the production owes much to Tairov’s in 1945:
I’ve got this idea that the play’s really all about 1945 not
1912, and I’d like to set it in two different time periods, put
it in this house high up on stilts and set the whole thing in a
big weird filmic landscape.18
But Daldry made the idea behind Tairov’s costuming of the

inspector in contemporary 1940s clothing – as opposed to the
Edwardian clothing worn by the rest of the cast – more central
to the production concept as a whole. The set, a kind of scaled-
up doll’s house on stilts barely large enough to contain the actors,
was marooned among the cobbled stones and rubble of post-Blitz
Britain. Located upstage right, the house with its large dining table
became less important than its temporal and visual setting: the
significance of the table, so prevalent in previous productions, had
shifted, to be replaced by two time settings placed directly inside
one another. From the opening of the production – when a small
boy comes to the front of the stage, acknowledges the audience
and then tries to switch on the 1940s radio placed stage right –
the audience is made aware of the double time setting. The heavy
red velvet and gold brocade curtain, hanging from the crumb-
ling proscenium arch, opens to Bernard Herrmann’s score for
Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and a crowd of actors in tatty 1940s
costumes enters stage left, our vision of them framed by a large
lamp-post, while the facing of the Edwardian house on stilts is
barely lit up, stage right (Sierz 1999: 24). We hear the Birling
family celebrating the engagement of Sheila and Gerald but can
barely see them through the dim lighting and the rain that fills
the ‘distinctly surreal’ set on stage (Lesser 1997: 16). Inside the
house all is comfort, while outside the adults and children of post-
Blitz England stand watching in the rain. It is Edna, the maid
barely featured in the original text, who is given a more significant,
although silent, role in the Daldry production. When the inspector
enters the stage, she announces his arrival and then ‘raises her arm
towards the house, a gesture that seemingly causes the whole
building to crack open down a vertical seam in its front so that
the walls swing back to expose the family seated within’ (Lesser
1997: 25). From this point on the Birlings speak from within the
house, from the balcony, the stairs or actually come onto the stage
out of the time-scale of the house itself. The inspector never enters
the house, and when at the beginning of Act III the house explodes
and tilts forward, spilling its contents onto the stage, the actors
no longer have the house as a physical separately secure space
from which to operate. Even as the house is slowly and almost
imperceptibly put back together, the relationship between the
1912 world of the Birlings and the world of the 1940s stage is
interlinked and made inseparable. The ‘film noir lighting’ which
creates shadows on stage and places the play firmly in the realms
of a ‘thriller’ dissipates as the production moves forward, but is
fully removed when the inspector’s final speech is delivered
directly to the lit auditorium: in this way the audience’s relation-
ship to the two worlds converged on the stage is restated – they
are implicated just as the inspector implicates the Birlings. As one
academic reviewer has noted, herein lay Daldry’s ‘major con-
ceptual notion’:
We are luminously enjoined to judge the social anomie of

the frequently sentimentalized Edwardian Age. Along with
the increasingly intrusive and solemn, non-speaking 1945
Figure 11 An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry, National

Theatre, London, 1992. Photograph: Ivan Kyncl.
chorus of folk, we of the observing present condemn the
moral vacuum, the misplaced values and the deplorable lack
of human feeling lurking just beneath the rigid mask of
propriety.19
Timely for the 1990s, the production mixed filmic and theatri-
cal techniques, just as it played on our conceptions of the time
period of the play. For Alex Sierz this created a post-modern feel,
whereby historical, aesthetic and thematic elements were self-
consciously manipulated (Sierz 1999). Daldry created a self-con-
scious and self-referential reading of the play, using sophisticated
mechanical options, such as the house on stilts which explodes
and collapses, more often associated with large-scale lavish
musical productions. He constructed the framework of the set –
the crumbling proscenium facing and old heavy red velvet curtain
– as another means of creating a self-conscious referral to a theatre
building far removed from the 1970s concrete, bricks and
minimalism of the National Theatre. For Sierz this was a direct
result of Daldry’s desire, above all else, to make the play speak
about class in our own time. For a number of reviewers, however,
Daldry’s production was perceived as an insult to the complexities
of the original play.
Critical reception
Despite its subsequent phenomenal success, some of the initial
criticism of the production was harsh. Critics felt that Daldry’s
perception of the play as a ‘political parable’ had been allowed
to override any alternative readings (Eyre 2003: 195). Wendy
Lesser points to John Lahr’s criticism of Daldry’s production in
the New Yorker: while the original impetus behind the play was
to ‘sell socialism’ Daldry’s ‘purpose in restaging the play had been
to “sell the idea of himself to the British public”’ (Lesser 1997:
38–9). Many of the production reviews question Daldry’s
directorial strategy. Sheridan Morley likened the crashing of the
house in Act III to Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, despising
the fact that Daldry had added some thirty actors to the cast,
as ‘witnesses’ in the form of the onstage silent onlookers. He
interpreted the setting as a beach in which the inspector was forced
into ‘bellowing his enquiries as if through a megaphone across the
sands’. For Morley, the impact of the play had been ‘defused and
diffused by a gimmicky travesty of the original’.20 In Michael
Arditti’s view the production evinced ‘so little faith in the play’
and was in effect a ‘Pirandellian exercise in theatrical ambiguity
and a sub-Bunuelian social satire’. Here it was felt that the design
concept swamped the play, and Arditti even suggested that the
National ‘cut out the middle man and substitute tours of the set’.21
Although Kirsty Milne read more complexity into the layers of
the production, she too felt that it was ‘weighted down by its own
portentousness’.22
The majority of reviews, however, praised the way in which
Daldry had been able to revamp a play seen in derogatory terms
by many as an ‘old chestnut’ or an ‘old warhorse of a play’: thus
Jack Tinkler’s response was that this ‘is how a musty, dust-laden
classic is polished and re-set to blaze like a new gem in the crown
of our cultural heritage’.23 Daldry’s 1994 American production
received similarly overt praise where the play itself was critiqued
as old fashioned and outdated but the production was, as Vincent
Canby suggested, an example of how to take a ‘modest idea’ –
being Priestley’s suggestion of creating multiple angles from which
to view the characters – and ‘run with it into outer theatrical
space’.24 The American critics largely perceived the politics of the
play as outmoded, they found Priestley ‘predictable’ and ‘sancti-
monious’ and the play to be ‘rooted in old socialist credos and
preaching injunctions’.25 It was the theatricality of the production
which impressed, rather than the ways in which Daldry had
attempted to find a way of reinvesting in the ideology of the text.
But both Eyre and Quentin Crisp noted that whether or not the
play acted as a ‘covert poultice for liberalism’ (Eyre 2003: 257),
New York audiences, who applauded the set as the curtain was
raised (Crisp 1996: 210), took to the production with ‘rapture’
(Eyre 2003: 257).
Despite Michael Codron’s assertion that the production would
not last longer than three months in the West End, it ran and
toured for over ten years (Eyre 2003: 226). To have a play with
an essentially socialist message, over forty years old, running in
the West End and touring successfully all over the world – in
Europe, America and Australasia – for such a length of time was
unheard of until Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls. For
Lesser, he solved the play’s spatial problems by removing the
constraints of the one-room set and playing with interlocking
ideas of time and space; but the potential to do so was already in
the text – Priestley had already advised getting rid of a realistic
setting altogether. As Tom Priestley has noted, it is hard to believe
that a ‘tired old play could run for two years’ let alone over ten
(Armistead 1994). The production, led by a director’s aesthetic
for an age of ‘director’s theatre’, not only changed the pattern of
Daldry’s own career, but also relocated Priestley in the public
imagination. It earned millions at the box office and also created
a renewed interest in Priestley as a radical and experimental
playwright; for whatever liberties Daldry had taken in terms of
his theatrical framing of the play, he barely changed the text at
all, merely finding an aesthetic strategy with which to extract and
explore the play’s original dramaturgical focus and ideological
relevance.
8 Johnson Over Jordan
The play: an ‘adventure in the theatre’

But now, with Johnson . . . it was a complete change of
method that interested me. . . . What I wanted to do was to
take my characters out of time. . . . You can do it in a dream
play . . . because in our dreams we do actually lead a genuine
if very confused, four dimensional existence. In dreams not
only are we free of the usual limitations of time and space,
not only do we return to our past and probably go forward
to our future, but the self that apparently experiences these
strange adventures is a more essential self, of no particular
age.
(Priestley 1939c: 124–5)
Johnson Over Jordan (1939) was one of Priestley’s most

experimental plays. In writing it he was pushing at the boundaries
of theatricality and the seeming limitations of mid-twentieth
century commercial staging practices. The play, centred on the
journey of an ‘Everyman’ figure, Robert Johnson, through the
moments between his death and some kind of afterlife, is seem-
ingly rather conventional; it is structured around three acts,
focused on the process of recapitulation of a central male figure.
One recent critic points to the fact that Johnson goes through an
‘enactment’ of death through ‘denial, anger, bargaining des-
pair and acceptance’, a process marked by similar emotional
markers to those experiencing grief after the death of a loved one
Johnson Over Jordan 165
(Friedman 2006: 81). However, from the opening moments
Priestley’s desire to create what, in the context of London’s West
End theatre just before the beginning of the Second World War,
was a challenging piece of theatre is obvious. For DeVitis and
Kalson it represented a ‘landmark occasion’ in the London theatre,
as a ‘biographical morality play’ (DeVitis and Kalson 1980: 185).
For Rebellato, the play was an attempt on Priestley’s part to bid
for ‘writer’s supremacy’ and yet the writing became lost in a
‘welter of competing attractions’ (Rebellato 1999: 72). Perhaps
as a result of these combined factors, the play ‘had a fate as
fantastic as its form’ (Priestley 1941a: 207).
Act I opens with Benjamin Britten’s musical composition;
Priestley had made an exciting choice in using this new, young
and experimental composer. The music begins ‘fiercely and
frighteningly and then sinks into funereal melancholy’: the score
punctuates and creates an aural landscape for the entire play. The
first discernible stage space is the hallway of Johnson’s home, a
liminal space through which the ‘real’ domestic spaces – dining
room, drawing room – are reached but never seen. The play opens
just before a funeral service at Johnson’s house: the mourners –
Jill, Johnson’s widow, Mrs Gregg, his mother-in-law, the Under-
taker’s Man and so on – all pass through the hallway. As this
first scene fades so we meet Johnson, ‘his face strongly illuminated
against a background of darkness . . . like a man in a delirium’
(Priestley 1941a: 7).
Johnson, unaware at first that he is actually dead, operates for
the majority of the play in a dream-like state. In writing the play
Priestley was influenced by the Tibetan Book of the Dead and by
the notion of Bardo: ‘an intermediate state that follows soon after
death – “a prolonged dream-like state, in what might be called
the fourth dimension of space, filled with hallucinatory visions
directly resultant from the mental-content of the percipient”’
(Priestley 1939c: 121). Thus Johnson imagines himself to be in
his office dictating a letter to his secretary: in fact there are four
secretaries, ‘blank-faced girls all wearing tortoise-shell glasses and
dressed alike’ (Priestley 1939c: 8). He then finds himself among
a hoard of clerks, secretaries and officials who confuse and
disorient him as does the ‘Voice from the Loud Speaker’: the
whole movement of the scenes takes him further into a Kafkaesque
world of dehumanised bureaucracy.
After a short meeting with his wife Jill, Johnson’s further
attempts to fill in the forms he has been given for completion are
interrupted by two newspaper boys shouting the headlines, ‘All
abou’ the big dee-saster’, ‘All abou’ the burning of London’
(Priestley 1939c: 32). He is then confronted with a younger
version of his boss Clayton, and taken back in time to re-
experience his first meeting with his mother-in-law. The act then
ends with Johnson talking to a skull-masked ‘Figure’ who offers
him money and informs him that the sound coming from the
brightly illuminated corridor he (and we) can see is dance-band
music from a nightclub into which Johnson rushes headlong.
Act II returns us to the hall of Johnson’s home on the day
following the funeral. Here his wife and his children Freda and
Richard are discussing him. The lights fade and then very slowly
a nightclub, lit ‘with strange crimson and purple lights’, appears
before us. All the characters he meets here wear grotesque masks,
characters such as Porker, Madame Vulture and Gorilla. This is a
nightmare scene where Johnson, moving in and out of focus among
the dancing nightclub revellers, becomes slowly more inebriated
and disoriented. Unaware of their real identity, Johnson mistakenly
stabs his own son and tries to sexually assault his daughter. The
character of the Figure from Act I returns and tells Johnson that
these ‘shadows were of your own making’, informs him that he is
in fact dead and comfortingly invites him to spend some time at
the ‘Inn at the End of the World’ (Priestley 1939c: 76).
The beginning of Act III takes us back to the hallway in
Johnson’s house where, two days after the funeral, the atmosphere
is warmer and ‘more cheerful’. As the conversation between family
and friends draws to a close, the light fades and we are taken to
the ‘Inn’. Here Johnson meets his favourite schoolmaster and even
the fictional character of Don Quixote, and we hear voices
speaking lines of well-known verse before he meets his children
and his wife once again. There is a reconciliation and then we hear
the voice of a clergyman coming from somewhere in the distance
– this takes us mentally back to the funeral ceremony. Finally the
unmasked Figure returns, ‘tall, hooded and very impressive. . . .
A golden shaft of light from below, illuminates him and throws
and immense shadow on the high curtain at the back’ (Priestley
1939c: 113): he tells Johnson that the time has come for him to
formally depart from this world and although Johnson struggles
with this suggestion, he leaves the stage after his final poetic
speech.
I have been a foolish, greedy and ignorant man;

Yet I have had my time beneath the sun and stars;
I have known the returning strength and sweetness of the
seasons. . . .
The earth is nobler than the world we have built upon it . . .
The world still shifting, dark, half evil.
But what have I done that I should have a better world,
Even though there is in me something that will not rest
Until it sees Paradise . . .?
(Priestley 1939c: 115)
Johnson, in bowler hat and raincoat and carrying his briefcase

leaves the stage, which has been ‘opened up to its maximum size’
and is bathed in a ‘growing intense blue light; the high curtains
have gone at the back . . . until at last we see the glitter of the stars
in space, and against them the curve of the world’s rim’. Johnson
exits against a vast night skylight to the sound of the brass section
of the orchestra blaring out triumphantly, drums rolling and
cymbals clashing. In this way, Priestley’s ‘ordinary middle class
citizen of our time’, having gone back in time – to both real and
imagined events – and reassessed his seemingly ‘small’ life, makes
a grand but silent exit against a huge background of light (Priestley
1939c: 116–17).
The play asks a great deal of the audience: they are not given
the standard drawing room sets of the average 1930s play, but
rather, symbolic spaces with drapes and lighting to aid the
imagination. Johnson is not an extraordinary man, but an ‘Every-
man’ whose journey through his actual and imagined past helps
him to understand a life he was perhaps too weak or timid to
change while alive. Priestley draws him in Jungian terms as ‘close
to the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness’
(Priestley 1977: 51): the suggestion is that through a more
conscious living of our lives we might take more responsibility for
our actions and better understand their impact on others (see also
Chapter 4) – and this in the original context of a country on the
brink of war is a challenging proposal.
Critical reception
it is a fascinating though seriously flawed work that over-
intellectualises an emotionally powerful subject, relies heavily
on stage gimmickry, and fails to develop its characters much
beyond the two dimensional.
(Friedman 2006: 76)
Critical responses to the play vary enormously with some

biographers and critics mentioning it only in terms of its perceived
‘failure’ on stage. John Braine divides the critical responses into
those who dismissed the play because of its expressionistic
elements and those who ‘recognised instantly its power and
grandeur, its enormous range, its masterly use of new techniques’
(Braine 1978: 93). Thus, David Hughes believed that the play
was spoilt by ‘the crying need for an eloquent vein of poetry that
would dispense with some of the deaths-head masks and stagey
formalities of dialogue which seemed to be . . . a hangover, too
obviously smeared with greasepaint, from the expressionists’
(Hughes 1958: 155). For Gareth Lloyd Evans the play’s optimism
and its lack of overt connection to the context of its writing,
removed it from the standard expressionistic work so disliked by
the critics (Evans 1964: 135).
More recently critics have seen the play as somehow being out
of synchronicity with other of Priestley’s stage works: that it was
an experiment which achieved little. Yet the experimental tone
of the play reverberates in a number of his other plays during the
late 1930s and early 1940s – plays such as Music at Night (1939),
They Came to a City (1943), Desert Highway (1944) and Ever
Since Paradise (1947). What many of the critics appear to miss,
however, is that Johnson Over Jordan is among the most ‘theatri-
cal’ of Priestley’s oeuvres. The text is more of a performance
score than a play text, with constant references to the means by
which both the stage space needs to be transformed and the
atmosphere controlled, by Britten’s soundscape and the trans-
formation of one lighting state into another. This, it would appear,
is what critics like Friedman and Agate might refer to as ‘stage
gimmickry’. Moreover, contrary to what has been the common
critical perception, Priestley was not writing a play ‘about death’
but rather one about ways of viewing a life, through intercutting
funeral scenes, scenes of emotional recapitulation and so on. He
was actually exploiting a form of montage, layering one scene
over another. Having originally used the funeral service as a
stronger framework, he cut this aspect between the original run
of the play and the transfer to the Saville: ‘the big Johnson scenes
were supposed to be happening within the brief limits of a short
funeral service’, but it seemed to the audience as if the service
was ‘lasting all evening’. In retrospect Priestley felt that removing
this framework had ‘ruined the fine effect of cutting appropriate
passages of the funeral service onto Johnson’s scenes’ (Priestley
1939c:123). Such experimentation with space and form – whereby
the space in which characters appear on stage is not overtly stated
through realist design – were still rare on the West End stages of
the late 1930s. In this way Johnson Over Jordan, rarely revived,
has not received the close critical attention it deserves as one of
Priestley’s most complex, difficult and experimental plays.
KEY PRODUCTIONS
Production I: Basil Dean’s Johnson Over

Jordan – extravagance and failure, 1939
Basil Dean’s 1939 production of Johnson Over Jordan has been
historicised as Priestley’s least successful play in performance.
Opening at the New Theatre in London’s West End in February,
the production transferred to the Saville in March where it ran
until early May of the same year. One academic has suggested
that the play ‘failed’ because of the close proximity of its
production to the beginning of the Second World War (Friedman
2006): certainly its subject matter did not embody the escapism
which might have appealed to an audience living in an atmosphere
of impending war. Arguably, the reasons for its relative failure
in terms of the length of production run have more to do with
the economics of West End management than with either the
impending war or the theme of the play. After all, there are other
Priestley plays which originally ran for fewer performances –
Bees on the Boat Deck (1936), People at Sea (1937), Goodnight
Children (1942) and Home is Tomorrow (1948) to name a few
– but of all his plays Johnson Over Jordan is well ahead of its time
in terms of the challenges it poses to a director and producer.
In an essay printed alongside the first edition of the play text,
Priestley pointed to the fact that this was to date his most
experimental play and the location for the production was to be
London, which for Priestley was home to the ‘least experimental’
theatre in the world. Although the play is not, contrary to
historical myth, Priestley’s least successful in terms of length of
production run, it was the most expensive production of one
of his plays in the 1930s, and more importantly, the play with
the most ‘curious history’ (Priestley 1939c: 133). Once again, he
saw the short production run as due in part to the financial
constraints and management structures of the West End, where
potential profit had to be shown very early on in a production
run or the theatre owners would give notice in the hope of
following up with a more immediately profitable production (see
Chapter 2).
Opening amid great publicity, Dean promoted Johnson Over
Jordan as ‘a modern morality . . . written intentionally, in an
extreme mixture of styles, realistic dialogue, poetic prose, with a
little blank verse thrown in at the end’. The production was
marketed as an attempt to ‘break fresh ground’ alongside pleas
for the theatre-going public to support what was to be an
expensive experiment.1 Designed by Edward Carrick (son of stage
designer and theorist Edward Gordon Craig) with a musical score
by the then unknown Benjamin Britten, the production made use
of masks – designed by Elizabeth Haffenden – ballet dancers and
experimental lighting, of which Dean wrote in great detail in his
autobiography. The set consisted of hessian canvas curtains hung
in wide ‘sweeping curves from the grid on special tracks’, two
cycloramas, one ‘painted and hung’, the other, in front, made of
‘blue silk’ and ‘made to part in the middle’. Each was to ‘be lighted
as if the other did not exist’: the stage was virtually bare with
‘hardly any scenery in the accepted sense, just a significant door
or window to indicate locality, and a few pieces of furniture for
similar purpose’ (Dean 1973: 265–6). Writing in 1973, Dean was
eager to point out that a bare ‘denuded’ stage was uncommon in
the West End of the 1930s as were the experiments in lighting,
which concentrated on ‘reflected light rather than spotlights’ to
create a luminosity, ‘the source of which would remain undis-
coverable by the audience’ (Dean 1973: 266). Dean had ‘twelve
special projectors with colour change apparatus controlled by
tracker wire’ designed for the production. These projectors
allowed Dean to ‘literally’ paint the ‘draperies with light in sym-
pathy with the mood of the events which Johnson was experi-
encing’ (Dean 1973: 268).
The embracing of such scenographic imagination, innovation
and expense was more usually associated with musicals than
experimental drama. As Priestley observed:
it was obvious from the start that with a large cast of actors,
ballet dancers, an unusually good orchestra in the pit, a
tremendous costume plot, and very expensive lighting effects,
our expenses would be on the musical comedy scale.
(Priestley 1939c: 129)
But the production would not have appealed to the types or

numbers of audience that would, in financial terms, justify the
expenditure. Priestley noted that in the mid-1930s he could mount
a production for under £1000 – around £40,000 in today’s money
(Priestley 1962: 153–4).2 By comparison, the costs of Johnson
Over Jordan were phenomenal, amounting to well over £5000
for the original production and the transfer to the Saville theatre
– over £200,000 in today’s terms. Even with a large cast headed
by Ralph Richardson, for whom the play had been written, it was
the initial cost of the production, not the everyday running costs,
which were crippling. The fees for Dean, Carrick, Haffenden,
Britten and the innovative choreographer Anthony Tudor took
about 20 per cent of costs, while the scenery, properties and
electrics made up 40 per cent.3
The production was to some extent financially doomed from the
start. In order to keep the theatre, virtually all seats had to be sold
each night, but Priestley noted that the more expensive stall seats
stayed pretty much empty throughout the short run at the New
Theatre. Advance bookings were low and although the theatre was
relatively full, the ‘fashionables’, as Priestley calls them, those more
likely to buy the more expensive seats, ‘were absent’. The cast and
orchestra were given notice shortly after the opening, but when
news got out that the production was to close only weeks into the
run, ‘the box office was besieged’. At a cost of nearly £1000, and
in an economic climate where ‘business in the Theatre was
generally terrible’, Priestley transferred the play and priced all the
seats at the lower rate (Priestley 1939c: 137, 138). Even with the
transfer, Johnson Over Jordan was taken off after less than another
two months. With a cast of twenty-three and huge capital outlay,
the production could only ever break even at best.
Basil Dean’s production ideas were to some extent a reflection
of the complex demands of the text, but they were also a result
of the years he had spent working in the film industry where
budgets were far beyond those in theatre. The play arguably
demanded a filmic vision and technique, with its multiple settings
and dream-like qualities and its seamless move from one temporal
and geographic setting to another. But Dean was criticised for
seizing on the play ‘as the chance to deploy to the limit all the
resources of the theatre’, and although Priestley had wanted to
bring into the production ‘everything that the Theatre could offer’
(Priestley 1939c: 133: 129), he later noted that if he were to mount
a production of the play again, he would have it done in a ‘simpler
fashion’ (Priestley 2001c: 18). Aspects of the production which
Dean explicitly laid out for the audience, as he might have done
in film, could have been implied – one or two ballet dancers could
have substituted for a whole crowd, the nightclub scene in Act II
could have been suggested rather than played out and so on. The
text itself, with its mix of styles and locations, could have been
played with in a more imaginative, less literal manner.
Figure 12 Johnson Over Jordan (the nightclub scene), directed by
Basil Dean, New Theatre, London, 1939. Photograph:
Angus McBean.
Critical reception
Paul Taylor has suggested that the publicity campaign which
preceded the production backfired because of the expectations
which it set up and this is certainly reflected in the very mixed
critical response which both the play and the production received
(Priestley 2001c). There was what Priestley described as an ‘excep-
tionally wide difference of opinion among critics and playgoers
as to the merits of Johnson’. This was in part due to the fact that,
hostile to experimentation and more beholden to ‘fixed and rigid’
ideas of what constituted a good play than ‘ordinary, fairly
intelligent members of the audience’, the critics saw ‘even less than
the laymen’ in the play’ (Priestley 1939c: 127). Agate (1946)
referred to the outdated nature of what he saw as an aping of
German Expressionism:
In this, the most old-fashioned piece he has yet contrived, our

author had gone back to the Expressionism of the nineteen-
twenties . . . dead almost before it was alive. You know the
kind of thing. A business magnate wants to write a letter,
whereupon twenty typists appear joggling twenty imaginary
typewriters while twenty-one office boys lick twenty imagin-
ary stamps. . . . The whole of the first act is a wilderness of
dusty antics of this sort.
(Agate 1946: 82–3)
Priestley (1939c) felt that Agate’s failure to critique the com-

plexities of the play was ‘lamentable’ and just another sign of the
unwillingness of theatre critics to encourage and promote
experimentation. John Braine has also pointed to the fact that
Agate’s critical framework showed little understanding of the fact
that Expressionism provided abstraction rather than individuation
in the way that Priestley had written Robert Johnson as a char-
acter (Braine 1978: 93). That Johnson is an ‘Everyman’, a ‘typical
specimen of our contemporary kind’ (Priestley 1939c: 123) may
have appealed to audiences who felt some affinity with his
emotional journey back through his own life and forward towards
his final reckoning with death, but it did not appeal to less
adventurous critics. For them, Johnson seemed ‘particularly ill-
suited to a journey into spiritual infinity – he whose author had
given him no inkling of spiritual understanding in life . . . a man
so limited by the standards of this world’: as such the play ran
‘steeply backwards like an unwinding spring from the lively first
act to the sterile, petrified curtain at the last’.4
Vincent Brome notes Priestley’s comments that friends avoided
‘mentioning “this lapse from dramatic sanity”’, but that the
younger critics found more favour with the production, which
had been given the kind of pre-production publicity campaign
more in line with those used by the film industry (Brome 1988:
237–8). In reality the division between young and old was not so
clear. W.A. Darlington claimed that this was Dean’s best theatre
production and thought that it was ‘certain to have great success’,
written as it was with ‘seriousness of purpose and great dignity
of mind’: less than a few weeks later he called it a ‘spectacular
failure’.5 For Harold Hobson the production had a ‘theatrical
validity; the writing, acting and production are expert’: he urged
theatre goers to ‘correct hearsay opinion by experience’ and go
to the Saville to see the transferred production’.6 Others found it
a ‘struggling courageous play, an experiment exciting even in its
failures’.7 The critics were split in their appraisal of play and
production but it was agreed that while perhaps over-publicised
and over-produced, Johnson Over Jordan was controversial both
as a text and in box office terms.
Production II: Jude Kelly’s West

Yorkshire Playhouse production –
marketing through Star Trek, 2001
not even the presence of Captain Picard could salvage the
production from the disaster of 11 September.
(Friedman 2006: 76)
Jude Kelly, then Artistic Director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse

in Leeds, instigated a season of plays by J.B. Priestley in 2001.
The season included Dangerous Corner and Eden End,8 as well
as rehearsed readings of other plays such as Summer Day’s
Dream, and was framed by Kelly as an opportunity to introduce
Priestley’s work, much of which she considered to be experi-
mental, to a new generation (see Kelly in Priestley 2001c: 8). The
season included a new production of Johnson Over Jordan, the
publicity for which was overwhelmed by the inclusion of Patrick
Stewart in the cast. Stewart had been a successful British classical
actor, but is internationally better known for his role in the Star
Trek series in the 1980s, where his character, Captain Jean Luc
Picard, became an iconic figure, famed for his courage, intellect,
leadership skills and for his commanding presence as the linchpin
of the series. Picard brought Stewart international recognition and
this was brought to bear on the Kelly production just as Ralph
Richardson’s celebrity status had on the original production in
1939.
Friedman suggests that the Kelly production somehow failed
because of its proximity to the attacks on the World Trade Center
in New York on 11 September 2001. In fact the production did
not ‘fail’ at all: it was part of a fixed season of plays in a subsidised
theatre, not a West End production. However, just as the publicity
Figure 13 Johnson Over Jordan (Patrick Stewart as Robert Johnson),

directed by Jude Kelly, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds,
2001. Photograph: Keith Pattison.
campaign for the original production in 1939, which emphasised
the significance of the innovatory and complex staging, could be
seen to have somehow been rather overworked, so too the Kelly
production was ironically overshadowed by the publicity
surrounding the return to the British theatre and especially to
Yorkshire, of Patrick Stewart, an ‘A list’ celebrity performer.
Jude Kelly wanted to re-examine Priestley following on from
the success of Daldry’s revival of An Inspector Calls (see Chapter
6). According to Paul Taylor, who worked on the production as
dramaturge, Kelly felt that Johnson Over Jordan offered the most
‘bracing challenge of any piece in the canon’ and it also offered
her the opportunity to work with Stewart again. For Taylor the
original ‘overblown’ production values had ‘swamped’ the
significance of Johnson’s journey and Kelly wanted to put the
significance of Johnson back at the ‘centre’ of the piece.9 With a
cast of ten, less than half the number of the performers in the
original production, and a score for two pianos, Kelly’s pro-
duction relied heavily on Rae Smith’s dynamic design, which was
much praised by the critics.
The play opens with Stewart as the solidly respectable clerk

Robert Johnson, on his deathbed on the apron stage. His
pyjama clad image is web-cammed onto a bare, white wall
running the width of the stage behind him which is then
kicked down by nightmare figures who emerge to take him
on to a Kafkaesque review of his own life.
What is left on the wall is then stripped away entirely to
reveal a grotesque nightclub which, in turn, masks a psychia-
trists study even further upstage, then, ultimately, dark water
suggesting the Jordan of the title. With a bed turning into a
grave and . . . the floor opening up as a series of pop-up
books, the set reveals endless depths and surprises.10
Critical reception
The design embraced technology and the possibility for scenes to
merge into one another, just as Daldry had done some nine years
earlier. Michael Coveney’s review suggests that the design,
Figure 14 Johnson Over Jordan (the nightclub scene), directed by
Jude Kelly, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, 2001.
Photograph: Keith Pattison.
although sophisticated in concept, came across as shoddy and
lacking style in production. He felt that the white spongy bricks
from the disintegrating wall simply got in the performers’ way
during the rest of the play and quite bluntly removes all imagi-
native licence when he complains that Johnson’s exit to ‘eternity’
took place across not a ‘sea of rippling waves’ as one reviewer
suggested,11 but rather clumsily over a ‘sea of black plastic’.12 A
number of reviewers complained of Kelly’s updating of the setting
and text – the deathbed scene was changed to a hospital bed scene
and topical references to homosexual marriage, going ‘clubbing’
and animal rights campaigns were inserted into the text. With a
score for two pianos replacing the original Britten music, many
found the aural framing – two ladies playing ‘soporific musical
doodling’13 – unsuited to the play or the production. For Coveney,
probably the fiercest of the reviewers, the alterations to the play
‘remove Priestley’s strict contrast between the pre-war sobriety
and the effusive. . . . Expressionism of the central episodes. And
they misguidedly pander to a modern sensibility’.14 Equally Rhoda
Koenig felt that the production failed to find a link with the
essence of the original, that Kelly, in modernising the text, had
removed its ability to make just that human connectivity she was
seeking in reviving the play in the first place.15
For Michael Billington Johnson Over Jordan has ‘echoes of
Kafka and premonitions of Pinter’, but these were not borne out
in a production, which as with the first one in 1939, was ambitious
in terms of staging but more so in terms of framing. Interestingly
the critics of Kelly’s production all grappled with the text as much
as they had done sixty or so years previously. In the early twenty-
first century, however, the reception and analysis of the play was
embroiled in an overall admiration and desire for reassessment
of Priestley’s career as well as a recognition that in Johnson Over
Jordan ‘the mundane and the mystical are brought together into
particularly affecting relation’.16 Even so, it would appear that
staging what is effectively an Everyman text, albeit one with
multiple locations and a large cast, posed similar problems in 2001
as it had done in 1939.
Afterword
The Theatre in England is not solidly planted in the com-

munal mind. It floats uneasily in mid-air, a wobbling
diaphanous thing. Officially it does not exist except for the
purposes of being licensed and taxed, and it is probably
classified with wrestling booths and coconut shies. Children
at school are given Shakespeare to read and often to act, but
when they leave school they soon discover that Shakespeare
and his workshop, the Theatre, do not matter at all. . . .
England has plenty of theatres, but nevertheless it says to the
Theatre: ‘I do not see you’. If you retort that I am making
too much fuss about the Theatre, for which you have never
cared, I shall reply that here the Theatre is symbolic of many
different adventures of the spirit, and that England now says
too often: ‘I do not see you’.
(Rain Upon Godshill: Priestley 1941a: 209)
J.B. Priestley continues to have a number of various and contra-

dictory reputations as a playwright. These are in part born of the
complexity of the ways in which theatre histories and histories of
dramatists’ works have been constructed. Priestley largely worked
for the commercial sectors of the industry in his lifetime and these
are the same sectors, perceived as either too commercial or too
populist, which have mostly fallen between the gaps in detailed
academic analyses. During his lifetime, his popularity as a play-
wright, entwined as it was with his career as a novelist, critic and
Afterword 181
journalist, spread far beyond the commercial sectors of the British
theatre industry. His work was produced all over continental
Europe – for example in Germany, the Netherlands and Russia –
and America, by professionals and amateurs alike. Even after his
heyday as a playwright from the 1930s to the 1950s, his work
continued to be produced on both stage and screen but the
landmark revamp of An Inspector Calls by Stephen Daldry in 1992
has created a whole new generation for whom Priestley’s plays
resonate. Apart from An Inspector Calls – embedded in the English
literature curriculum in England for some time now – plays such
as Dangerous Corner, The Linden Tree, When We Are Married
and Time and the Conways are still the staples of the student and
amateur repertoire in both Britain and North America.
Always an industry which falls prey to mirroring itself, the
British theatre embraced – albeit with some hesitance at first – the
success of the Daldry production, and new productions of
Priestley’s plays were mounted in the hope of replicating his
success. In the publicity for her Priestley season at the West
Yorkshire Playhouse in 2001, Jude Kelly consistently referred to
her desire to reappraise the playwright, to reinvent his reputation:
such a season of his works would have been unlikely without the
success of the Daldry production. Both directors saw in Priestley
not only a socialist and humanist, but also a playwright who
experimented with the relationship between content and form.
Both equally recognised the filmic quality of his work. Like
Tairov, they saw the ideological specificity of his plays reflected
in his desire to push at the aesthetic boundaries of theatre.
My first intuitive reaction to J.B. Priestley was that he was

this old dear with his pipe who had nothing really exciting to
say. Then I read his other plays . . . and read about his
relationship with Benjamin Britten and with Jung. . . . The
explosion of form that he was trying to investigate in these
plays feels extraordinarily radical . . . [his] really experi-
mental, challenging work is not part of the theatrical canon
. . . [he] was an experimental dramatist in his time.
(Daldry 1993: 6)
182 Afterword
The response to Priestley from literary critics is still heavily
influenced by the dislike by some of the modernists for his
populism, his lack of support for the highbrow and his consequent
relegation to the realms of the middle-brow writers of his era.
Baxendale reminds us that, even nowadays, Woolf scholars are
drawn to her condemnation of him as one of the ‘stinking
underworld of hack writers’ (Baxendale 2007) and points to their
ignorant categorisation of Priestley with the political right. Yet
much of Priestley’s experimentation embraces modernist tenden-
cies: plays such as Johnson Over Jordan and Ever Since Paradise
have more in common with the high modernist aesthetic than they
do with the English ‘realist tradition’. Literary critics sometimes
problematise the diversity of his writing but still herald him as
being in a class of his own (Skloot 1970: 431).
There remains a framework for analysis which perpetuates the
perceived irreconcilable nature of his popularity, prolific output,
politics and the context of much of his theatre work. He continues
to be perceived by some as a ‘lesser’ playwright of the mid-
twentieth century, despite the evidence to the contrary. Very few
playwrights have experienced a similar level of continual success
within such broad social and theatrical contexts. Equally, many
other playwrights of the period in which his plays were first
produced have been virtually removed from the literary canon,
but few have caught the attention of young and artistically
ambitious directors in the way in which Priestley has.
Although this volume has barely touched upon plays such as
Desert Highway (1944), Dragon’s Mouth (1952) or The Long
Mirror (1952), or looked at Priestley’s film work – some of which
can be accessed via the British Film Institute and the British
Library – the intention has been to provide a detailed and analyti-
cal framework for his ideas about theatre and a range of plays
which he wrote for it. Equally, of his many novels I have focused
only on those which have theatre and performance at their heart.
Others are currently writing books on Priestley’s politics and on
his literary and political versions of ‘England/Englishness’ (see
Baxendale 2007; Fagge 2008). His son, Tom Priestley, has edited
a seminal collection of his writing on theatre (see Priestley 2005)
and the relevance of his ideas to many aspects of today’s theatre
Afterword 183
industry is still strongly discernible. His novels and plays are still
being reprinted and the J.B. Priestley Society, based in his home
town Bradford, England, continues to discuss, publicise and
celebrate his work. Rare among his contemporaries, Priestley
believed that theatre and literature had a social function. A
complex man, and one whose work resists any easy categorisa-
tion, he often benefited from the mechanisms of a theatre industry
which he despised. But this did not stop him from theorising and
campaigning for change: for Priestley, like Brecht, political change
and a change in the perceived function and practice of theatre as
an art form, is always possible if you show it to be so.
Appendix
London productions and revivals
of J.B. Priestley plays 1931–59
Play Production Transfer Number of

performances
The Good His Majesty’s Lyric 331

Companions 14 May 1931 – 25 Jan 1932 –
23 Jan 1932 27 Feb 1932
Dangerous Lyric 150
Corner 17 May 1932 – Prod: Tyrone
24 Sep 1932 Guthrie
Laburnum Duchess Queen’s 335
Grove 28 Nov 1933 – 13 Aug 1934 – Prod: Cedric
11 Aug 1934 15 Sept 1934 Hardwicke
Eden End Duchess 162
13 Sep 1934 – Prod: Irene
2 Feb 1935 Hentschel
Cornelius Duchess 77
20 Mar 1935 – Prod: Basil
25 May 1935 Dean
Duet in Apollo 6
Floodlight 4 Jun 1935 –
8 Jun 1935
If We All Vaudeville 1
Talked Like 13 Oct 1935
the Talkies
Bees on the Lyric 37
Boat Deck 5 May 1936 –
6 Jun 1936
Appendix 185

performances
Time and the Duchess 225

Conways 26 Aug 1937 – Prod: Irene
12 Mar 1938 Hentschel
I Have Been Royalty 210
Here Before 22 Sep 1937 – Prod: Lewis
26 March 1938 Casson
People at Sea Apollo 43
24 Nov 1937 –
1 Jan 1938
When We Are St Martin’s Princes 279
Married 11 Oct 1938 – 27 March Prod: Basil
11 Mar 1939 1939 – Dean
24 June 1939
Dangerous Westminster 69
Corner 19 Oct 1938 –
17 Dec 1938
Johnson Over New Saville 75
Jordan 22 Feb 1939 – 21 March Prod: Basil
11 Mar 1939 1939 – 6 May Dean
1939
Music at Night Westminster 79
10 Oct 1939 –
16 Dec 1939
Cornelius Westminster 15
27 Aug 1940 –
7 Sept 1940
When We Are Vaudeville 12
Married 6 Mar 1941 –
15 Mar 1941
Goodnight New 49
Children 5 Feb 1942 –
14 Mar 1942
They Came to Globe 280
a City 21 Apr 1943 – Prod: Irene
11 Dec 1943 Hentschel
186 Appendix

performances
Desert Highway Playhouse 45

10 Feb 1944 –
19 Feb 1944 and
7 Mar 1944 – 45
1 Apr 1944
How Are They Apollo 164
at Home? 4 May 1944 –
12 Aug 1944 and
16 Sept 1944 –
14 Oct 1944
An Inspector New 41
Calls 1 Oct 1946 – Prod: Basil
14 Mar 1947 Dean
(in repertoire)
I Have Been Theatre Royal, 16
Here Before Stratford East
26 May 1947 –
7 Jun 1947
Ever Since New 165
Paradise 4 Jun 1947 –
25 Oct 1947
The Linden Tree Duchess 422
15 Aug 1947 – Dir: Michael
21 Aug 1948 Macowan
Eden End Duchess 100
26 Aug 1948 –
20 Nov 1948
Home is Cambridge 37
Tomorrow 4 Nov 1948 – Dir: Michael
4 Dec 1948 Macowan
The Linden Tree Theatre Royal, 8
Stratford East
7 Mar 1949 –
12 Mar 1949
An Inspector Theatre Royal, 8
Calls Stratford East
25 Apr 1949 –
30 Apr 1949
Appendix 187

performances
Dangerous Theatre Royal, 7

Corner Stratford East
29 Aug 1949 –
3 Sep 1949
Summer Day’s St Martin’s 43
Dream 8 Sep 1949 – Dir: Michael
15 Oct 1949 Macowan
The Olympians Covent Garden 10
(Arthur Bliss 29 Sep 1949 –
mus. J.B.P. 3 Feb 1950
Libretto) (In repertoire)
Dragon’s Mouth Winter Garden 55
with Jacquetta 13 May 1952 –
Hawkes 28 Jun 1952
The Long Mirror Court 13

29 Oct 1952 –
9 Nov 1952
The White Saville 5
Countess 24 Mar 1954 – 2
7 Mar 1954
Mr Kettle and Duchess 211
Mrs Moon 1 Sep 1955 – Dir: Tony
3 Mar 1956 Richardson
The Glass Cage Piccadilly 35
26 Apr 1957 – Crest
25 May 1957 Theatre
Toronto
Dir: Henry
Kaplan
A Severed Head Opened: Criterion Dir: Val May
(adaptation of Theatre
Iris Murdoch 27 Jun 1963
novel)
Notes
1 Life, career and politics

1 Useful archive materials on J.B. Priestley can be found at the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
(HRHRC). The archive is made up of donations from the Priestley
family (1963 and 1985). The first deposit was collated by Priestley
and contains manuscripts and publications as well as a selection of
correspondence which he thought would be of interest. The second
deposit remains largely uncatalogued. The HRHRC also has the files
of A.D. Peters, Priestley’s agent. The Theatre Museum (London) and
the University of London also have materials on first productions and
publications. The University of Bradford Special Collections Archive
(Bradford, England) has the most comprehensive holdings of Priestley
materials, including a great deal on world productions and original
photographs.
2 HRHRC Correspondence file with JBP: n.d.
3 HRHRC Correspondence file with JBP: Storm Jameson, 30 June
1940.
4 HRHRC Correspondence files with JBP: Ernest Bevin, 9 August
1940.
5 HRHRC Correspondence with JBP: Carl Jung, 8 November 1958
and 17 July 1946; see also Schoenl (1998).
6 Interview with Tom Priestley (b. 1932) in March 2006. Priestley’s
son, Tom Priestley, film and documentary maker, is chairman of the
J.B. Priestley Society (Bradford, England) and has edited and
annotated many of the republications of his father’s work.
7 HRHRC typescript of review of Oak Leaves and Lavender (circa
1946).
8 Ibid.
Notes 189
2 The function and practice of theatre
1 Basil Dean, a major director and producer of both theatre and film,
later founded ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association)
run as an organisation which employed professional actors and
theatre workers to provide entertainment for soldiers during the
Second World War.
2 Lost Empires (2002 [1986]) Goldhill Home Media International
(originally Granada Television) www.goldhill.com. DVD no.
GH1681-3.
3 The typescript of the unfinished novel is titled These Our Actors
although the catalogue at the HRHRC lists it as being called
Birmingpool. The cover sheet includes the following statement by
Priestley on the central character in the book: ‘I borrowed some of
his characteristics from my friend and Theatre colleague Ralph
Richardson’. On the typescript itself Priestley noted: ‘There are some
good things about acting and the Theatre in it, fruits of my own
experience’.
4 Tairov was waiting for a translation of Jenny Villiers and hoped ‘to
be able to create, in the result [sic] of our common work a really
interesting performance, that will for a long time remain on [sic] the
repertoire of our theatre’. Keen to continue the professional rela-
tionship with Priestley, Tairov wanted ‘to have the opportunity many
a time to show the Russian public the plays of John Priestley’
(HRHRC Correspondence file: Tairov to JBP, 17 December 1945).
The archive at the University of Bradford Special Collections (UoB)
J.B. Priestley Collection contains a great deal on Priestley’s work in
improving the UK’s relationship with the USSR (also see Priestley
1946).
5 HRHRC Correspondence file: James Agate, 6 May 1947.
6 HRHRC A.D. Peters Records files.
7 UoB J.B. Priestley Collection: Accounts file.
8 Ibid.
3 The family, gender and sexual relations

1 See Illustrated, 19 April 1941, no. 8 for information on Jane
Priestley’s work with evacuated and orphaned children at Broxwood
Court Hotel in Leominster (copy in UoB J.B. Priestley Collection).
2 The Times, 28 April 1932.
3 New Statesman, 21 May 1932.
4 The Times, 18 May 1932.
5 Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, British Library, File 11138,
Dangerous Corner.
6 Everyman, 26 May 1932.
190 Notes
7 Sunday Times, 22 May 1932.
8 The play was republished for the first time in 2003 following on from
a rehearsed reading during the Priestley season at the West Yorkshire
Playhouse in 2001.
9 The original production of Eden End, directed by Irene Hentschel,
ran at the Duchess theatre in the West End for 162 performances.
10 Independent, 19 December 2001.
11 The Linden Tree originally ran at the Duchess theatre for 422
performances, a very long run for a West End play in a production
context which had changed significantly since the 1939–45 war.
12 Laburnum Grove originally ran at the Duchess theatre, and then
transferred to the Queen’s theatre for a total of 335 performances.
Basil Dean later produced a film of the play, directed for Associated
Talking Pictures by Carol Reed and starring Edmund Gwenn in 1936.
13 The original production of Mr Kettle and Mrs Moon ran for 211
performances and was directed by Tony Richardson, who in 1956
went on to stage John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the play which
supposedly shaped a whole new generation of angry young male play;
Rebellato 1999).
4 Time and the time plays

1 Dr Maurice Nicoll, a former student of Jung, was one of the key
figures responsible for disseminating and deconstructing Ouspensky’s
ideas for public consumption. His medical status gave credibility to
Ouspensky’s work during a time when a number of ‘pseudo-mystical
groups were in operation’ in London (Reyner 1981: 50). See also
www.eurekaeditions.com.nicoll2.htm.
2 Michael Costell, Introduction to ‘The New Age’ (a small print
journals from the interwar period) in the Modernist Journals project,
http:Ildl.lib.brown.edu:8080/exist/mjp.
3 First Night file cuttings: I Have Been Here Before (unidentified
reviewers), The Theatre Museum, London.
5 Work and visions of dystopia/utopia

1 Holger Klein (2004) ‘Home is Utopia: Priestley’s vision of an ideal
society.’ Typescript of the annual lecture of the J.B. Priestley Society,
15 May 2004, University of Bradford (UoB J.B. Priestley Collection).
2 See http://www.jgonline.co.uk/orangetree/whats-on-now-next.asp?
ID=146
3 The original London production was directed by Basil Dean and
starred Ralph Richardson as Cornelius. It ran for seventy-seven
performances and is one of the few plays by Priestley which has not
received numerous revivals.
Notes 191
4 The production ran for forty-three performances and the play has
rarely been revived, although John Gielgud starred as Dawlish in a
BBC adaptation made in the mid-1990s. Gielgud refers to the play
as ‘little known’ and written in 1945. The BBC production was
directed by Christopher Morahan, who also directed The Orange
Tree revival in 2006 of The Linden Tree (Gielgud, in Mangan 2004:
487).
5 Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, 9 September 1949, p. 9.
6 Although very favourably received, accumulating good press and
discussion in the media all over Britain, the production did not
succeed in London. Priestley once more pointed to the inadequacies
of the London theatre system, where the production was taken off
before audiences could build up in number (see Priestley 1949b).
6 The Good Companions

1 A.E. Wilson, ‘The Good Companions on the Stage’, The Star, 15 May
1931.
2 Theatre World, June 1931, p. 270.
3 Punch, or The London Charivari, 27 May 1931, p. 582.
4 Mrs Dangle, ‘The Theatre’, Time and Tide, 23 May 1931.
5 The Times, 15 May 1931.
6 Ivor Brown, ‘Heart of Oakroyd’, The Week-end Review, 23 May
1931, p. 779.
7 The Good Companions, 1933, reprinted and distributed by Engle-
wood Entertainment, LLC, USA www.englewd.com.
8 See Roger Debris, ‘1950s British Musical Movies’, http://myweb.
tiscali.co.uk/britmusical/1950s and ‘The Good Companions (1957
film)’, http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/britmusical/tgcessay.htm
9 Ibid.
10 The Times, 16 June 2005.
11 Guardian, 5 June 1974, p. 9.
12 Letter to Ronald Harwood, UoB J.B. Priestley Collection – The Good
Companions File, 15 July 1974.
13 The Good Companions, sung by the original London cast, 1974,
Andor Inc. DRG Records CD 15020.
14 Guardian, 5 June 1974.
7 An Inspector Calls
1 Noël Coward in a letter to Jack [sic] Priestley, 9 January 1947: ‘I
must write and tell you how immensely I enjoyed it . . . finely written,
brilliantly constructed. . . . The end incidentally, was the complete
surprise to me that you intended it to be’ (HRHRC Correspondence
file).
192 Notes
2 See www.aninspectorcalls.com.au/stephendaldry.html
3 Trewin, J.C. (1946) ‘Mr. Priestley Calls’, Observer, Theatre Museum
First Night File: October 1946.
4 Stephen Potter, ‘An Inspector Calls’, New Statesman, undated cutting
from UoB J.B. Priestley collection: An Inspector Calls file.
5 John Allen, ‘Inspector at the Vic’, undated cutting from UoB J.B.
Priestley Collection: An Inspector Calls file.
6 Ibid.
from UoB J.B. Priestley Collection: An Inspector Calls file.
8 Lionel Hale, ‘Mr. Priestley is up against a dead end’, Daily Mail, 2
October 1940.
9 The Times, 2 October 1946.
10 Undated cutting, Theatre Museum First Night File: October 1946.
11 Trewin, J.C. (1946) ‘Mr. Priestley Calls’, Observer, Theatre Museum
First Night File: October 1946.
from UoB J.B. Priestley Collection: An Inspector Calls file.
13 An Inspector Calls, 1954 Watergate Productions Ltd. Available as a
DVD: Studio Canal: Cinema Club CCD30031.
14 The Times, 11 September 1992.
15 Ibid.
16 See www.albemarle-london.com/inspect.html
17 Matthew Sweet, Independent, 8 April 2001.
18 See www.aninspectorcalls.com.au/stephendaldry.html
19 Jeffrey S. Miller, ‘Review of An Inspector Calls’, in Theatre Journal,
46(3) October 1994, pp. 404–5.
20 Spectator, 26 September 1992.
21 Evening Standard, 14 September 1992.
22 Sunday Telegraph, 9 September 1992.
23 Daily Mail, 12 September 1992.
24 New York Times, 8 May 1994.
25 New York Times, 28 April 1994.
8 Johnson Over Jordan

1 Observer, 29 January 1939.
2 In 2005 the equivalent value of £500 from 1939 was around £20,650
(see http://eh.net).
3 UoB J.B. Priestley Collection: Theatrical Accounts files for Johnson
Over Jordan.
4 Anon (1939) ‘J.B. Priestley’s very material intimations of immortality:
Johnson Over Jordan’, The Play, undated cutting, Theatre Museum
First Night File.
5 Daily Telegraph, 23 February and 4 March 1939.
Notes 193
6 Observer, 26 March 1939.
7 The Times, 23 February 1939.
8 Dangerous Corner was a co-production with London based Really
Useful Theatres and transferred into the West End after its run at
the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2001.
9 Independent, 12 September 2001.
10 Express, 14 September 2001.
11 Guardian, 14 September 2001.
12 Daily Mail, 14 September 2001.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
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200 Bibliography
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& Van Thal.
Priestley, J.B. (1946) Russian Journey, London: Writers Group of the
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Heinemann.
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Statesman and Nation, 31 October: 515–16.
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TV Mirror, 5(14): 20–1.
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November.
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Heinemann.
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J.B. Priestley, New York: Chilmark Press.
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Press.
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Dream and The Glass Cage, London: Oberon.
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202 Bibliography
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Bibliography 203
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Macmillan.
Worrall, N. (1989) Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage,
Index
Agate, James 24, 25, 47, 55, 56, Carey, John 17–19
174 Carrick, Edward 170–171
Allen, John 150 CEMA 29
Anker, Kathleen 150 Chaplin, Charlie 13, 20
Archer, William 46 Modern Times 90
Arnold, Matthew 46 Chekhov, Anton
Arts Council of Great Britain 29, [The Cherry Orchard]
34, 45, 148 76
Ashcroft, Peggy 12, 13 CND 24
Ashwell, Lena [Century Theatre, Codron, Michael 162
Notting Hill] 31 Collins, Diana 24
Atkins, John 17 Cook, Judith 7
Attlee, Clement 158 Cooper, Gladys 31
Auden, W.H. 20 Coveney, Michael 177, 179
Coward, Noël 4, 15, 62, 143
Baker, Josephine 134 The Vortex 33
Barker, Clive 91 Craig, Edward Gordon 170
Barker, Harley Granville 29, 30, Crisp, Quentin 162
44 Curzon, Frank 31
Barry, J.M. 12
Baxendale, John 26, 109 Daldry’ Stephen [1992,
Beamont, ‘Binkie’ 14 production of An
Bennett, Arnold 18 Inspector Calls] 10, 26,
Bevin, Ernest 12 145, 149–150, 155–163,
Brecht, Bertolt 4, 183 181
Britten, Benjamin 165, 170 American premier of Daldry’s
British Lion Films 152 An Inspector Calls 157–8,
Brome, Vincent 7 177
BBC 12, 109 Dane, Clemence 33
Overseas Service 11 Darlington, W.A. 175
Burrell, John 148 Davis, T.C. 30
Index 205
1 Dean, Basil 12, 27, 44, 50, 148, Hitler, Adolph 21
2 150, 169, 171 H.M.Tennant Ltd. 14
ReandeaN productions 33 Hobson, Harold 175
3
Dench, Judie 137 Hollywood 33
4 Dickens, Charles 19 Homosexual Law Reform Society
5 Dunne, J.W. 91–98 24
6 An Experiment with Time 93 Hughes, David 168
7 Dyer, Richard 107
Innes, Christopher 97, 103
8
Einstein, Albert [Theory of International Theatre Conference
9 Relativity] 89 24
0 Eliot, T.S. 15, 20, 37, 49 International Theatre Institute 24
11 The Family Reunion 20 1941 Committee 24
12 ‘Burnt Norton’ 89 Irving, Henry 30
Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage
1311
31 Jameson, Storm 11
14 English Stage Company 33 J.B. Priestley Society 183
15 Entertainment Tax, The 32–33 Johnson, Celia 135
16 Ervine, St John 53 Joint Council of the National
17 Evans, Gareth Lloyd 76, 111, Theatre 148
130, 168 Jung, Carl 15, 61, 92, 99, 167
18
Everyman Theatre, Hampstead
19 31 Kelly, Jude 175, 177
20 Eyre, Richard 156 Klein, Holger 108
21 Expressionism 174, 179 Knoblock, Edward 128
22 Komisarjevsky, Theodore 13
Firth, Colin 40
23
Forbes, Brian 154 Lahr, John 161
24 Forster, E.M. 17 Leavis, F.R. 17
25 Fry, Christopher 20 London Mask Theatre Company
26 20, 49, 50
27 Gaumont British 132 London Symphony Orchestra
Gielgud, John 12, 133 138
28
Guest, Val [Expresso Bongo] 135 Lord Chamberlain office 32
29 Guinness, Alec 12, 14, 148
30 Guthrie, Tyrone 44 Macowen, Michael 12, 44, 49,
31 Gwenn, Edmund 82, 132 50
32 MacNeil, Ian 149, 157
Haffenden, Elizabeth 170–171 Malvern Drama Festival 104
33
Hamilton, Guy 152, 154 Mansfield, Katherine 99
34 Hart-Davis, Rupert 12 Marshall, Norman 33
35 Harvey, David 92 Matthews, Jessie 125
36 Hawkes, Jacquetta 15, 24, 25 Maugham, Somerset 15, 62
37 Hentschel, Irene 12, 50 Maurier, Gerald du 31
Herrmann, Bernard 159 Maqueen-Pope, Walter 54
381
206 Index
Mercer, Johnnie 137 Literature and Western Man
Metro Goldwyn Mayer 34 16
Miller, Max 134 The Edwardians 16
Mills, John 137 Political causes 23
Milne, Kirsty 162 ‘postscript’ broadcasts 11
Mitchelhill, J.P. 49, 50 Theatre monopolies and
Mitford sisters, the 104 cartels, 22
Moore, Eileen 154 Travel 16
Morgan, Charles 53 Plays and Novels
Morley, Sheridan 161, 162 An Inspector Calls 6, 23, 57,
Murray, Braham 138 65, 93–98, 139–163, 181
Bees on the Boat Deck 57,
National Theatre, the 155 108, 110–115, 170
Newton, Chance 53 Cornelius 49, 57, 110–115
Nazism 104 Dangerous Corner 9, 64,
Nicholl, Maurice 99 65–70, 81, 88, 93–98, 128,
143, 144, 175, 181
O’Casey, Sean [Oak Leaves and Desert Highway 168, 181
Lavender] 20 Dragon’s Mouth 182
Old Vic Theatre 148 Eden End 49, 51, 74–76, 175
Olivier, Lawrence 40, 111, 148 Ever Since Paradise 9, 10,
O’Neill, Eugene [Strange 83–88, 101, 102–106, 168,
Interlude] 104 181
Osborne, John, Look Back in Goodnight Children 170
Anger 5 Home is Tomorrow 49, 57,
Ouspensky, P. 91, 92 120–122, 170
New Model of the Universe How Are They At Home 10,
98–99 83–88
I Have Been Here Before 56,
Parker, Thane 49, 50 98–102
Peters, A.D. 50, 152 Jenny Villiers 7, 33–44
Pinter, Harold 179 Johnson Over Jordan 6, 55,
Plater, Alan 138 61, 80–83, 102–106, 115,
Poe, Edgar Allan [The Fall of the 164–179, 182
house of Usher] 161 Laburnum Grove 9, 49, 51,
Potter, Stephen 150 55, 80–83, 108, 128
Previn, André 137 Lost Empires 7, 38–44
Priestley, J[ohn] B[oynton] Mr Kettle and Mrs Moon
Autobiographical writing 16 83–88,
Bradford 27 Music at Night 101, 102–106,
Margin Released 50 168
Rain Upon Godshill 180 People at Sea 170
Literary criticism 16, 28 Summer’s Day Dream 49,
English Humour 16 57, 108, 110, 118–120,
English Journey 127 175
Index 207
1 When We Are Married 9, 55, Sierz, Alex 161
2 83–88, 181 Simm, Alistair 152
The Glass Cage 70–74, 82 Sinfield, Alan 24, 70
3
The Good Companions 6, 7, Stafford-Clark, Max 156
4 9, 38–44, 64, 82, 125–138 St Denis, Michel 13
5 The Linden Tree 10, 49, 50, Star Trek 175
6 79–80, 110–115, 128, 181 Stewart, Patrick 176, 177
7 The Long Mirror 182 Stokes, John 74
These Our Actors 40 Sweet, Matthew 158
8
They Came to a City 9, 23,
9 55, 56, 61, 108, 110, Tairov, Alexander [The Kamerny
0 115–118, 168 Theatre, Moscow] 42,
11 Time and The Conways 9, 49, 144–148, 150, 158–9
12 51, 55, 76–79, 81, 93–98, Taylor, F.W. [Taylorism] 90
101, 144, 181 Taylor, Paul 177
1311
Spring Tide 49 Thatcher, Margaret 157
14 Social criticism The Orange Tree Theatre,
15 English Journey 127 Richmond 113
16 ‘In Praise of the Normal Thompson, J. Lee 134
17 Woman’ 62 The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Letter to a Returning 165
18
Serviceman 21 Tinkler, Jack 162
19 Out of The People 108 Trewin, J. C. 151
20 The Arts Under Socialism 47
21 Priestley, Tom 19, 74, 163, 182 Walker, Lynne 78
22 Wall Street Crash 125
Rattigan, Terrence 15 Warbeck, Stephen 157
23
Rebellato, Dan 24, 165 Waterhouse, Keith 39
24 Richardson, Ralph 12, 14, 111, Welles, H.G. 139
25 148 Welfare State 48
26 Roberts, Rachel 136 West, Rebecca 11
27 Royal Court theatre 33, 156 West Yorkshire Playhouse 175
Royal Exchange Theatre 78 Winslow, Christa 49
28
Williams, Emlyn 49
29 Sansom, Laurie [Dangerous Williams, Raymond 110
30 Corner at the Yorkshire Willis, Ted 14, 39
31 Playhouse/Garrick Theatre Woolf, Virginia 18–19,
32 in 2001] 70 Wyndham Lewis, Jane [née Jane
Saville, Victor 132 Bannerman] 10, 25
33
Shaw, G[eorge] B[ernard] 12, 23, Wolfenden Report 24
34 29, 46, 50, 56, 139
35 Sherriff, R.C. Journey’s End 8 York Theatre Royal 158
36
37
381

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J.B.

J.B. Priestley is the ﬁrst book to provide a detailed and up to date

Professor Maggie B. Gale is Chair of Drama at the University

Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists is a new series

Volumes currently available in the series are:

J.B. Priestley by Maggie B. Gale

Future volumes will include:

Caryl Churchill by Mary Luckhurst

ISBN 0-203-93262-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0–415–40242–5 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–40242–2 (hbk)

List of illustrations vii

1 Life, career and politics 3

2 The function and practice of theatre: visions,

3 The family, gender and sexual relations 61

4 Time and the time plays 89

5 Work and visions of dystopia/utopia 107

6 The Good Companions 125

7 An Inspector Calls 139

1 J.B. Priestley: wartime broadcasting for the BBC 11

I would like to thank the University of Manchester, the Arts and

His career demonstrated a new thread of mobility in the

I see him . . . as in one way to be bracketed with Noël

Although a socialist by conviction, Priestley did not share Brecht’s

Life and career: from Bradford to the

after the war I turned away from politics, not because my

J.B. Priestley’s professional work in the theatre began in the early

We carry a theatre around with us, and we should enjoy the

Here, late in life, Priestley is referring to the mediation of public

When I look back on my life . . . these four-and-a-half years

For Priestley, dramatic representations of the 1914–18 war,

Life and career: from the West End to

Figure 1 J.B. Priestley: wartime broadcasting for the BBC.

Priestley’s wartime radio broadcasts, known as the Sunday

Life: a man through the eyes of others

I was particularly impressed by the two aspects of your

Jung’s analysis of Priestley, who had visited him on a number

I have been on the whole a very lucky man. I have helped to

Career: the politics of the ‘new’ criticism

The journalist-critics I knew . . . were rapidly losing that all-

Indeed his analysis that he was seen as some kind of ‘Quisling of

At the age of 50 Priestley will be saying ‘Why don’t the

For Priestley the function and social reach of literature in the

Politics: the politics of class and social

There was a time around 1940, when we were able to

refuse with scorn the great dope-dreams of the economic

Priestley’s progressive political outlook combined his under-

I have heard Bernard Shaw argue eloquently against the

Using the example of a post-revolutionary Russia, he notes that

Life, career, politics: conclusion

I did not go to work in the Theatre and then discover, because

A ‘constant playgoer during his ‘teens in Bradford’ (Priestley 1970:

Progressive in his era, Priestley celebrated theatre as a unique live

The art of drama, as actually presented on the stage, is not a

For Priestley, as for practitioners from previous generations

Function: the theatre as an industry

Unlike the majority of its European counterparts, the British

Theatre at present is not controlled by dramatists, actors,

Priestley’s assessment of the impact of this form of management