Time And The Conways

There are some plays that should not be exhumed for public performance.  Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden is one of them, and this play by J B Priestley is another.  Nearly two decades ago, Stephen Daldry worked wonders with a National Theatre revival of Priestley's An Inspector Calls.  It ran and toured for most of the 1990s.  On this occasion, theatrical wunderkind Rupert Goold is the director who is trying to turn the sow's ear into a silk purse.  Though young Rupert goolds the lily in characteristic style, it doesn't work.  This is a play written in 1937 when Priestley was exploring some dotty theories about the nature of time.  Despite a lucidly written programme note by A C Grayling, I'm still in the dark about what he was getting at. I once spent a transatlantic flight sitting next to a professor of astrophysics who tried to explain Einstein's theory of relativity to me, but when we touched down in Baltimore I was still none the wiser. Isaac Newton still rules OK as far as I'm concerned.  Priestley takes a well-off provincial family headed by a widowed mother in 1919 when they are celebrating the birthday of one of the daughters, then fast-forwards in Act two to 1938 when their lives have turned out quite differently, then goes back in Act three to finish the party.  Kay, the daughter who is turning 21, has flashes of insight into the future, indicated by some heavy-duty emoting and lots of twiddling with the stage lighting.  There are loud banging noises at significant moments, and the last two acts end with some over-developed Gooldian stage trickery.  'Isn't he clever!' seems to be the response that is being elicited.  The PBA (poor bloody actors) do their best with this second-rate tosh.  But the characterisation is too thin, even for excellent performers like Francesca Annis and Adrian Scarborough.  As a social drama about a doomed class and about the way life crushes our dreams of happiness, this falls miles behind Chekhov's Cherry Orchard.   There are playwrights who manage to turn obscure ideas into riveting theatre (Stoppard's Arcadia is a wonderful play about the nature of time and how we misunderstand the past) but I don't think Priestley was one of them, on the evidence of this one.   Goold tries to give the play extra meaning by slowing down the play to a crawl and minimising the stage movement, but this only accentuates the banalities.    After three acts and two intervals, I was screaming to be let out of the Lyttelton theatre and allowed to go home. 

Comments

[Simone]

Absolutely agree with you John.

I saw this at a preview and was mentally exhausted I couldnt bring myself to finish the review that I started to write.