Review Theatre: Time and the Conways | National Theatre | JB Priestley | First World War | Woodrow Wilson | League of Nations

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The Review - THEATRE by DAN CARRIER
Published: 5 June 2009

( Hazel (Lydia Leonard), Robin (Mark Dexter) and Carol (Faye Castelow)

Conways is still timely

TIME AND THE CONWAYS
National Theatre (Lyttelton)

WHILE Time and the Conways is not JB Priestley’s best-known play, it was the Bradford-born author’s favourite.
He had managed to write a story that combined both the light- hearted parlour style entertainment of the period with tragedy: and he also used the plot as a skeleton to hang the flesh of his beliefs on.
Priestley was fascinated by the passage of time, and his musings on it appear regularly in his works – he once wrote a story about a group of travellers on a Tube to Belsize Park... which never reaches its destination, forcing those on board to consider what eternity means. He was also haunted by his own experiences during the First World War, the ghosts of his generation lingering in his psyche.
This prompted him to pen the play in 1936, to consider how it could be that the lessons from the slaughter of 1914-1918 had not been heeded, and that war seemed once again inevitable.
It is a straightforward story. Act one introduces us to the Conway family, rejoicing in the end of the Great War, holding a frivolous birthday party where a game of charades brings in a host of family friends. With the safe return of brother/son Robin from the air force, things are looking good.
Act two zooms us forward to 1937 – and another war is looming. The bright future offered in the Roaring Twenties has long disappeared in the mire of the Wall Street Crash, the rise of Fascism and the now-bankrupt concept of Woodrow Wilson’s world order and the League of Nations.
The fortunes of the Conways have gone the same way. The final act takes us back to 1919, where the seeds for such misfortune are now there to see.
As you would expect with a National Theatre production, the cast bring alive Priestley’s words and the sets are brilliant – the ending of the first act, when the drawing room lives of the Conway girls become frozen in time, is particularly impressive.
Francesca Annis as Mrs Conway fills her role with the right level of matriarchal grandeur, while the Conway girls hold the attention as their life-plans disintegrate.
Priestley used the family as a metaphor for the world he saw around him at the time.
Couldn’t we have looked back into our past and noticed how our actions were going to form our future?
Seven decades after Priestley penned the play from his writing bureau at his Highgate home, Time and the Conways’ lessons on learning from the past have resonance.
Until July 27
020 7452 3000

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