Time and the Conways by J. B. Priestley

First published: 1937

First produced: 1937, at the Duchess Theatre, London

Type of plot: Problem play

Time of work: 1919 and 1938

Locale: Newlingham, England

Principal Characters:

• Mrs. Conway, a widow
• Alan Conway, her eldest son
• Madge Conway, her daughter, who has intellectual interests
• Robin Conway, her younger son, his mother’s favorite
• Hazel Conway, her daughter, the beauty of the family
• Kay Conway, her daughter, who has literary aspirations
• Carol Conway, age sixteen, her youngest child
• Joan Helford, Hazel’s friend who marries Robin
• Ernest Beevers, a young businessman who marries Hazel
• Gerald Thornton, a solicitor

The Play

Time and the Conways opens on an autumn evening in 1919, in a well-to-do home in the manufacturing town of Newlingham, England. A party is heard offstage, but the set is dark. Hazel Conway enters and switches on the light. She is in party dress and carries an armload of props and costumes for charades. She is joined by her sisters and eldest brother, and they begin to rummage through the costumes. Kay Conway enters; it is her twenty-first birthday. She also begins playacting with the charades costumes, and the sisters plan their skits. Mrs. Conway comes in, to plan her part.

The talk turns to an absent brother, Robin, recently demobilized from the Royal Air Force, and to their father’s death by drowning. Joan Helford, a friend of Hazel, questions Kay about her writing, which has been unsuccessful: She has burned her last novel. Family members enter and leave throughout as the charades progress offstage. Gerald Thornton enters, arguing politics with Madge Conway. He, too, is being dressed for charades. Ernest Beevers enters: He is an awkward but ambitious man from a lower-class background. He is introduced but is snubbed by Hazel, with whom he is infatuated. He is forced to play charades with the others. Kay reprimands Hazel for being cruel to Beevers, and Hazel responds by poking fun at Kay’s ambition to be a writer.

As the last scene for charades is planned, Robin returns home. An emotional reunion ensues between Robin and Mrs. Conway; he is her favorite child. Joan Helford enters, and she and Robin show an obvious interest in each other, which deeply annoys Mrs. Conway. The sisters begin to return to the room, picking up the props and costumes. Mrs. Conway goes out to sing for the guests. Kay is finally left alone on the stage, listening to her mother sing. Attempting to write, she turns off the lights and stares out the window as the curtain drops.

Act 2 opens on the same room, with Kay still seated by the window. When Alan Conway enters and turns on the lights, it is apparent that the act is set in a different time: The room is redecorated, and there is a wireless set onstage. Kay and Alan are middle-aged. They greet each other and discuss Kay’s job as a tabloid film journalist in London. Kay reveals that she has given up writing novels and that she has had an unhappy affair with a married man. Alan, somewhat seedy and still a clerk, presents Kay with a gift: It is again her birthday, this time her fortieth.

Joan, who is separated from Robin, arrives followed by Madge, now a headmistress at a girls’ school. Madge and Kay begin to spar defensively about their failed careers. Hazel joins them, very well dressed. She is uncomfortable at talk of the possible arrival of her husband, Ernest Beevers. Mrs. Conway enters and takes charge of the company. There is to be a business meeting, and the family is waiting for the arrival of Gerald Thornton, Mrs. Conway’s solicitor. Mrs. Conway engages in antagonistic conversation with Kay and Madge. She then presents Kay with a gift, a brooch made of diamonds, once a present from her husband. Gerald and Ernest arrive. Hazel is embarrassed by Ernest’s brutal manner with her and fearful of his antagonism toward her family. Mrs. Conway calls the group to order, and Gerald begins to discuss her financial position. Mrs. Conway is revealed to be in financial straits, and Gerald advises that she sell the house and acquire some capital to invest in renovating other properties. The family begins to argue, and Madge accuses her mother of wasting money on her favorite son, Robin.

In the course of arguing and reminiscing, the family discusses the death of Carol Conway sixteen years earlier. Ernest states his conviction that Carol was the best of the Conways. Robin arrives and begins drinking; he receives a warm welcome only from his mother. Gerald tries to remind the family of their mother’s precarious financial position, and Hazel asks Ernest to loan her mother the needed capital. Vengefully he refuses, denounces the Conways, and moves to leave. Hazel at first refuses to accompany him, then fearfully gives in. Mrs. Conway slaps Ernest in the face before he leaves. The rest of the family renew their arguing. Gerald, Alan, and Joan depart. Madge reminds her mother of a time when she deliberately ruined Madge’s chance for a match with Gerald. Mrs. Conway declares that her once-promising children have amounted to nothing. Family members continue to depart until Alan and Kay are alone. Alan attempts to console the despondent Kay by describing for her a theory of time, according to which one’s life is a consistent whole with only a small portion in view at any moment: “Time doesn’t destroy anything. It merely moves us on—in this life—from one peephole to the next.” He leaves Kay sitting at the window alone as the curtain drops.

Act 3 returns to the setting of act 1, in 1919, as Kay sits by the window listening to her mother sing. Alan enters, and Kay tells him, confusedly, that she has seen something: “I wasn’t asleep. But—quite suddenly—I thought I saw . . . we were. . . . Anyhow, you came into it, I think, Alan.” The party guests are about to leave, and Kay goes to see them off. Family members and guests begin to enter and leave the stage in succession. Hazel and Ernest discuss his attachment to her; in the course of their conversation she loses her nerve and he begins to dominate her. Madge and Robin enter, arguing about politics. Both begin to argue with—and sneer at—Ernest, leaving him dejected. Carol returns and cheers him up, inviting him to return and play charades.

Gerald and Mrs. Conway enter, talking about finances. The sale of the house is debated and rejected, and Gerald agrees that the Conways’ future seems secure. Offstage, Robin announces a game of hide-and-seek. Robin finds Joan, and they kiss and announce their love. The others arrive, led by Carol. Madge is having a spirited political debate with Gerald. Just as he begins to be fascinated by her intensity, Mrs. Conway enters with Hazel and makes fun of Madge, who silently departs. Tea is served, and Robin and Joan announce their engagement. The family happily discuss their prospects for the future, but Kay stops them, crying. She begs Alan to help her: “there’s something . . . something . . . you could tell me.” Alan promises Kay that one day he will have something to tell her; the lights come down, leaving at first only Kay and Alan and then darkness.

Dramatic Devices

In his examination of the relation between time and life, J. B. Priestley was highly aware of the usefulness of the dramatic form. The drama, relying on illusion, role-playing, and manipulation of a time frame, lends itself easily to an analysis of the nature of perception. In Time and the Conways, Priestley made the audience highly aware of the subjective, even unreliable quality of the action onstage. At the opening of the play, the audience is, in effect, backstage, watching family and friends prepare to play their roles. The party itself, which would seem to be the “important” event, is only heard offstage. Throughout the play, significance is removed from what might at first seem important—the party, the plans for the future—and given to the seemingly trivial—the childhood games, the casual remarks.

Priestley’s most obvious manipulation of theatrical time appears in act 2, when the action shifts to the future. If Priestley had staged the acts chronologically, the play would remain the story of a family’s decline. The resistance to displaying chronological time, however, permits a view not of decline but of the simultaneous knowledge of promise and loss. Act 3 essentially carries on the relationships as they appeared in act 1, but the view of the future that has been granted to Kay and the audience results in a continual summoning of opposites. In act 3, the characters begin to discuss their futures, and Mrs. Conway enthusiastically describes her children’s future visits: “with wives and husbands and lovely children of your own . . . enjoying our silly old jokes, sometimes playing the same silly old games, all one big happy family. I can see us all here again—.”

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.

Kay’s foreknowledge, granted to her in her vision, allies her in the final act with the audience. If Priestley had not made the Kay of act 1 a viewer of the Kay of act 2, then the audience would have remained entirely outside the action onstage. Just as Priestley has given a backstage sense to act 1, however, denying the significance of the party itself and the actual performance of charades, in act 3 the integrity of theatrical performance and its rules is again questioned. Not only is the audience engaged in an activity parallel to Kay’s—using the glimpse of the future to judge the “present” moment—but its activity is also an extension of Kay’s. The audience observes Kay observing herself, and the theatrical spectator thus becomes a part of the central action of the play. In Priestley’s enactment of time theory, theatrical spectatorship becomes a model for the perception of life in time.

Critical Context

Time and the Conways is one of three so-called Time Plays written by J. B. Priestley in the 1930’s. Dangerous Corner (pr., pb. 1932) and I Have Been Here Before (pr., pb. 1937) show the same concern with the possibility of representing an idea using a popular, realistic dramatic form. These plays were written early in Priestley’s career as a dramatist; he had already established himself as a novelist and critic, and he would continue to write for the stage into the 1960’s. The plays represent both Priestley’s early experiments with dramatic form and his lifelong interest in the philosophical possibilities of popular art forms. The Time Plays are among Priestley’s most important attempts to domesticate philosophy, to show an abstract significance in the everyday. In these plays, the philosophical matter is provided by the theorists J. W. Dunne and P. D. Ouspensky, whose New Model of the Universe (1931) examined the possibility of the recurrence of events in time.

Time and the Conways is the most accomplished of the Time Plays in its dramatic technique. Dangerous Corner examines the notion of a division in time, when a seemingly casual comment bears the potential for the concealment or revelation of truth. A group of people at a party are slowly implicated in the death of a friend and relative, and the progress of their conversation can—and does—follow two distinct and opposite paths. The play makes ample use of the mystery at its center, but in this earliest of the Time Plays Priestley has not taken advantage of the theatrical possibilities inherent in his subject. In I Have Been Here Before, inspired by Ouspensky’s idea of repetition, Priestley is more aware of the dramatic potential of the theory at hand but relies on a character outside the action, the German Görtler, to expound the theory and attempt to break the repetition of tragic events, of adultery and suicide, into which the other characters have fallen. It is only with the creation of Kay Conway that Priestley finds a way to connect theatrical performance with theory.

Sources for Further Study

Cook, Judith. Priestley. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.

De Vitis, A. A., and Albert E. Kalson. J. B. Priestley. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

Evans, Gareth Lloyd. J. B. Priestley: The Dramatist. London: Heinemann, 1964.

Foot, Michael. William Hazlitt, J. B. Priestley. Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1990.

Gray, Dulcie. J. B. Priestley. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2000.

Hughes, David. J. B. Priestley: An Informal Study of His Work. London: Hart Davis, 1958.

Klein, Holger. J. B. Priestley’s Plays. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1988.

Priestley, J. B. The Art of the Dramatist. London: Heinemann, 1957.

Skloot, Robert. “The Time Plays of J. B. Priestley.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (December, 1970): 426-431.

Smith, Grover, Jr. “Time Alive: J. W. Dunne and J. B. Priestley.” South Atlantic Quarterly 56 (April, 1957): 224-233.