Time and the Conways: A Play in Three Acts

John Boynton Priestley

S. French, 1939 - Drama - 84 pages

4m, 6f / Scenery: Interior

The Conways are having a party to celebrate Kay's twenty first birthday. Kay hopes to be a novelist. Hazel, the beauty, anticipates a romantic marriage. Madge wants to reform the world and marry the dashing young family lawyer. Carol, the baby of the family, spreads good cheer while Robin, back from war, is certain to have a good career. Alan is content to be an armchair philosopher. The nitwit mother has high hopes for them all. At the party Kay, with frightening clarity, sees her family twenty years in the future. They are petty, mean, and unfulfilled. Only Kay and her calm brother realize time is relative and there is something fine and worthwhile beyond.

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 4
• Section 3: 33

About the author

English novelist, playwright, and critic J. B. Priestley was born in Bradford in Yorkshire, the setting for many of his stories, and was educated at Cambridge University. Although he first established a reputation with critical writings such as The English Comic Characters (1925), The English Novel (1927), and English Humor (1928), it is for his novels and plays that he is best known. Priestley was, like John Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham, a novelist only partially committed to his playwriting. Yet he became the dominant literary figure in the London West End during the 1930s, as he attempted to make realistically rendered domestic conversation the vehicle for a mature study of personality and emotion. Philosophical theories about time, Socialist dogmatism (often erupting into sermons), and a taste for dramatic expressionism may be said to have finally deflected him from his goal. Priestley's experimental bent nevertheless yielded, among his more than 25 plays, a number of striking theatrical situations---the soliloquies of Ever since Paradise, the reviewed life in Johnson over Jordan (1939), the replay of an ill-fated conversational turn in Dangerous Corner (his most successful play, 1934), and the supernatural visitation in An Inspector Calls (his acknowledged masterpiece, 1946).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Time and the Conways: A Play in Three Acts; Issue 116 of French's acting edition; G - Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series
• Author: John Boynton Priestley
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: S. French, 1939
• Original from: Indiana University
• Digitized: Feb 19, 2009
• ISBN: 0573014469, 9780573014468
• Length: 84 pages
• Subjects: Drama / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Drama / General