Disappointing portrayal of family turmoil

Time and the Conways, Lyceum Theatre, Oldham

THAT J B Priestley, he might have written some good plays if he hadn’t fancied himself as something of a metaphysics intellectual.

It took a radical reinterpretation of “An Inspector Calls” to overturn years of pipe-smoke-laden attitudes to Priestley’s mix of Yorkshire grit and bluff comedy and see him hailed as a 20th century master — or very nearly.

But a slightly less radical National Theatre production of this drama, last year, failed to make much impact.

This was partly because, in an age when cinema can time-shift until we’re dizzy, Priestley’s attempts in 1937 to experiment, theatrically, with non-linear time look old-hat and cumbersome.

Priestley’s theme is that the Conways, a well-off, middle-class family of widowed mother and six children, is in 1919 looking forward to a comfortable, war-free life in a world of aspirations

But in act two we jump forward to 1938, and find that ill-fortune or stupidity has hit them all.

In act three we rewind to seconds after the end of act one, to see how the seeds of this descent are sown by conceited self-importance and complacency. Oh, the weight of casual remarks...

But does that make this a bad play? No it doesn’t: if we forgive the blatant intrusions of Priestley’s socialist tendencies and time-bending beliefs (which boil down to “bad things happen, get over it”), this is a rather good — especially for its time — study of a family in turmoil.

Relationships shift and turn as events take the characters to their apparent destinies.

Which brings us to this Lyceum Players production, sadly not the well-constructed, beautifully-cast piece it needs to be but rather disappointing overall, with some misjudgements of tone and character by director Karen Barton.

Sam Al Hamdani is good as the diffident older brother; Ruth Blaszczok gives her usual confident performance as Kay — the character around whom much of the action shifts, and Grace Weetman is charming and enthusiastic as youngest girl Carol.

But the same cannot be said for many of the others, with characters getting laughs where none should exist and an occasional lightness of touch the context doesn’t really warrant.