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

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Love-Obstructing Parents: Mrs Conway knowingly spoils a conversation between Gerald and Madge, derailing a growing attraction.

In terms of the play's structure, then, first we see a promising situation; next, we see what it becomes; and, finally, as we wonder how and why things go wrong, we see that things are already less than perfect in the life of the seemingly happy family.Mrs. Conway, a widow living in a provincial town. She is in her mid-forties at the start of the play and is well dressed, talkative, and very conscious of her status in local society. She is at her best at parties and other social gatherings; she has little practical knowledge or talent. Her behavior as a mother is a central concern in the play. The promising lives of her children are shown to be wasted, and she herself faces financial ruin at the end of the play. Act Two plunges us into the shattered lives of the Conways exactly twenty years later. Gathering in the same room where they were celebrating in Act One we see how their lives have failed in different ways. Robin has become a dissolute travelling salesman, estranged from his wife Joan, Madge has failed to realise her socialist dreams, Carol is dead, Hazel is married to the sadistic but wealthy Ernest. Kay has succeeded to a certain extent as an independent woman but has not realised her dreams of novel writing. Worst of all, Mrs Conway’s fortune has been squandered, the family home is to be sold and the children’s inheritance is gone. As the Act unfolds resentments and tensions explode and the Conways are split apart by misery and grief. Only Alan, the quietest of the family, seems to possess a quiet calm. In the final scene of the Act, Alan and Kay are left on stage and, as Kay expresses her misery Alan suggests to her that the secret of life is to understand its true reality – that the perception that Time is linear and that we have to grab and take what we can before we die is false. If we can see Time as eternally present, that at any given moment we are seeing only ‘a cross section of ourselves,’ then we can transcend our suffering and find no need to hurt or have conflict with other people. Briefly show how both authors represent people as reaping what they sow, and how far it may be possible to escape the consequences of one's earlier actions. Another way of doing this would be to consider the stories in terms of past and present: the present consequences of past actions. I Have Been Here Before, which is inspired by P. D. Ouspensky's theory of eternal recurrence from A New Model of the Universe; [3] If he did, he gave himself a bit of an out, in Alan. Although it’s easy to come out the end of the third act, the end of the play, with a feeling of hopelessness from all the ironic optimism, there is a moment of genuine optimism embedded in the end of the second act. Of all the Conways, Alan is the only one who doesn’t seem miserable. He’s as subdued and reserved in 1937 as he is in 1919. Priestley wasn’t bold enough to have Alan proclaim that the next war really would set things straight, but he at least nodded to his own inability to see what was coming:

Mrs. Conway, who is an accomplished singer, is now expected to entertain the guests, and the other characters follow her off stage, except for Kay and Carol, who speak of their ambitions. What is your opinion of the way the two texts present the idea of seeing or failing to see what the future will bring? Note that both authors tell the reader/audience things the characters have yet to discover. Eventually Carol rejoins the party, leaving Kay alone on stage, listening to the singing from the drawing-room; she appears to be staring "not at but into something" as the act ends. In one sense nothing very much has happened in this act, but Priestley has introduced us to his main characters and their situation, in readiness for what is to come. The play is concerned very much with the author's ideas about time, but the structure of the play shows the relation between different periods in the characters' lives, by presenting these in an odd time-sequence: the first and last acts take place in a short continuous period on the same day, while the second act occurs nineteen years later to the day (Kay's birthday). To understand how the promise of the first act has led to the unhappiness of the second, we are given further information in the third act, which makes this clear. As for this one ..we meet the Conways in 1919, at a daughter's 21st birthday. The Conways are attractive, well-liked, affluent, and survived the war well (with the exception of the father). They banter with each other, tease each other a little - brother Robin comes home that night, friend Gerald brings in a man who's been dying to meet them...This act ends with a request from Kay to Alan to tell her something she thinks he knows. She quotes, in part and confusedly, the lines from Blake which Alan has spoken in Act Two. Mrs. Conway dismisses Kay's fears, patronisingly, as "all this birthday excitement". But once again, the act concludes with Kay and Alan together on the stage. He cannot yet tell her what she wants to hear (he does not, after all, know it himself yet - it is she alone who has correctly, if vaguely, foreseen the future). But he promises that one day "there will be - something" that he can tell her. The publication of English Journey in 1934 emphasised Priestley's concern for social problems and the welfare of ordinary people. In 1984, the play was adapted for film by the Soviet studio Mosfilm and was directed by Vladimir Basov. It starred Rufina Nifontova as Mrs. Conway, Vladimir Basov Jr. as Ernest Beevers in youth, Vladimir Basov as Ernest Beevers at maturity and Margarita Volodina as Kay.[9][10] In 1984, the play was adapted for film by the Soviet studio Mosfilm and was directed by Vladimir Basov. It starred Rufina Nifontova as Mrs. Conway, Vladimir Basov Jr. as Ernest Beevers in youth, Vladimir Basov as Ernest Beevers at maturity and Margarita Volodina as Kay. [9] [10]

As this is a play, what matters here most is the audience's general impression of a family whose initial closeness as a group reflects their closeness in age. But there is more definite information, for attentive audiences, in the case of the important matters of dating. This is established by Priestley's setting the acts in different years but on the same day of the year, and introducing a simple device (Kay's birthday) to remind us of this.Alan's retreat into the dull life of a shabby town hall clerk follows his disappointment in love: he is in love with Joan, and his stability and patience might enable her to achieve domestic happiness. Alan follows Joan as the game of "Hide and Seek" begins, but she begs him to leave, as she is attracted to the dashing but worthless Robin; she is infatuated with him but cannot see that they are ill-matched - she is too weak to sort him out, and he will not accept his responsibility as a husband or father: Mrs. Conway is pleased by the courtship as she is incapable of seeing her younger son's failings. Rupert Goold’s National Theatre debut comes in the form of JB Priestley’s three-act play which asks unanswerable questions about the extent of our ability to control our own future. In 1919, Hazel’s first reaction to Ernest Beevers - based purely on his name, before they meet - is to joke that "I’m sorry for his wife if he has one". In 1937, she’s unhappily married to him and very scared of her husband. Hazel's future is also fixed in Act Three. Though she speaks of marrying a tall "rather good-looking man about five or six years older" than herself, travelling the world or living in London, she has already met her husband. He has decided this, and she is powerless to resist - the only thing she gets almost right is his age. Ernest is attracted to Hazel sexually and socially (she will be a status symbol for a successful businessman) and because he can dominate her. He recognizes that Carol is a better person, and she seems, despite her youth, better able to stand up to him (p. 67). Marrying Hazel is Ernest's choice, and he is at least honest enough to accept responsibility for his choice (p. 50: "I got the one I wanted") but they are not well-matched and rapidly assume the rôles of bully and victim. Ironically her journalist sister enters the fashionable world Hazel always hoped to live in.

This 1985 production from the BBC Drama Unit stays almost completely faithful to the text and with no incidental music of any kind, unsurprisingly has a filmed-play look and feel to it. This, though I think is to be commended for allowing the play to be viewed as the writer intended. The ensemble acting is excellent as we view the disintegration of this well-to-do family, whose wealth and social position can't protect them from the intrusive effects of human weakness, thwarted ambitions and bad choices. You are asked to discuss these two works in terms of the authors' exploration of ideas about happy families. You will have received detailed study guides which show you how to write about this theme in each work. As you write about either book, you should be ready to make any brief points of comparison about the other text which may occur to you as you write. When you have written about each work, you should make a fuller comparison; there is no single right way of doing this, but you may wish to consider some or all of the following: Reaping and sowing Mrs. Conway is presented initially as an ideal mother. In 1919, she is still an attractive woman, as we see when she flirts with Gerald. She joins in the charade, and is a very good singer. She has overcome her grief at her husband's death and found comfort in the love of her many children, whose ambitions she encourages and whose talents she nurtures. But she is subsequently shown to have poor judgement, and her ideas of how her children should live their lives is revealed as an unfair burden of expectation.

The King and I - Kelly Ohara and Cast Tonys Awards

Time and the Conways was adapted in 1985 by BBC for television[11] with Claire Bloom as Mrs Conway, Phyllis Logan as Kay, Nicholas Le Prevost as Gerald, Geraldine James as Madge and Simon Shepherd as Robin.[citation needed] The progression of the characters’ lives, which usually provides much of the interest of dramatic plots and is therefore desired by the audience, becomes instead something dreaded. The limited, forward impetus of time has been resisted, not only by simple manipulation of the dramatic structure but also by the alteration of audience sensibility that follows. Having seen the outcome of the characters’ lives, the audience can no longer be curious about it, and the attention of the audience can thus be focused elsewhere; it is focused, ultimately, on Kay. It's a clever play - Priestly wrote some excellent books and drama. There's a touch of melodrama in it, and maybe some fatalism - but the content will stay with you. The acting (as are most British plays of this vintage) is superb. Claire Bloom (as the mother) is wonderfully touching, then catty, then dominant, the manipulative. When Mrs. Conway appears she is full of criticism: for Joan and Hazel, because they are weak, and for Madge because she is an old maid. Though Kay has not married, she has had affairs and is still attractive, and Mrs. Conway now favours her. She is contemptuous of her bachelor son, Alan.