Last night Owen and I stepped back in time and then back again. And then back again... Go figure!

The reason for all this to-ing and fro-ing was Rupert Goold's production of J.B. Priestley's TIME AND THE CONWAYS in the Lyttelton at the National Theatre.

I have never seen the play before but on a peruse of his biog in the programme I discovered I had seen more of Priestley's plays than I had thought and they are all solid, well-written works that are definitely of the period. He was a fascinating character, a writer who could turn his hand to any form and who's left-wing politics left him jobless by the BBC during WWII. He also was fascinated by the concept of time. All his interests crop up in TIME AND THE CONWAYS.

In 1918, the Conway family are throwing a party. The war is over, the youngest son is returning home from the RAF safely and Kay, one of the four Conway sisters, is celebrating her 21st birthday. The family are finding their feet after the death of their father and are comfortably off thanks to his investments. One by one we meet the family: Mrs. Conway the loving but vain mother, Alan the quiet eldest son, Madge sensible and interested in politics and education, Hazel the glamorous and flighty one, the would-be novelist Kay, Carol the youngest and finally Robin, the RAF pilot who is the apple off his mother's eye. Also present are the gauche Joan, friend of the sisters, the young lawyer Gerald Thornton who looks after their affairs and his latest client, the working-class businessman Ernest Beevers who has his eye on Hazel although she deplores his presumption and lowly status.

The first act bobs along as the sisters whirl and chatter away about the party, men and nothing in particular in their cut-glass accents - which belie the fact the play is set in the midlands - and by the end of it we know who all ten are and their place in the world. But the first act ends ominously with Kay alone and nearly fainting, frozen in attitude as the room rotates around her.
Priestley then jettisons us 19 years forward to 1937... the same room but now drab and empty but for a dining table and chairs. Again we meet the ten characters who have gathered back at the family home for a meeting: Mrs. Conway is now a querulous old woman, adept at emotional cruelty, who lives with Alan, a faded office clerk; Madge now a headmistress and chaffing at having to see siblings she has nothing in common with; Hazel is unhappily married to the quietly brutal Beevers; Kay has grown into a brittle journalist unhappy in love and Robin, the tarnished golden boy, a travelling salesman with a drink problem and estranged from his wife Joan. Gerald reappears and informs them that the money is running out. The stage is then set for the airing of old and new grievances amid filial and marital discord with Beevers finally able to revenge himself on years of class snobbery.
In the third act Priestley then pulls us back to where we left Kay at the end of the first act and we watch the characters again as the party ends, unknowingly setting themselves on the collective journey which will lead them back to that room in 19 years time.

I enjoyed the play but had trouble with Goold's unnecessarily post-modern take on it. As we are talking about the sins of the past catching up with you, 17 years ago in the same theatre Stephen Daldrey directed his hugely popular reinterpretation of Priestley's AN INSPECTOR CALLS which pointed up not only Priestley's solid plot but also the similar timewarp theme. All the time I was watching this production I felt Goold was striving to do the same with this play but to limited success.The actors - although an excellent ensemble - have been directed in a very odd way. Goold has them playing it in a highly theatrical, vaguely irritating style, making it difficult to empathize with any of the characters as they are played as posh stereotypes as opposed to characters. It is made all the more bizarre as half the cast appear to be playing it naturalistic while a few are sticking to the theatrical style - this is particularly a problem with Hattie Morahan's performance as Kay. She is tolerable as the artistic 21 year old but less so as the emotionally shellacked journalist - she plays the second act striking a "hard-smoking" pose and playing it like she has seen one too many Kay Hammond movies. In fact several of the worse offenders give that idea, that they were given a stack of 1930s British films to watch as homework and that is solely what they have based their performances on - all external show, no inner life. It was disheartening to watch their declamatory performances with tittering echoing from the peanut seats.
Goold has also grafted bits of business onto the three act's curtain moments - Morahan's 'freeze-frame' works well in the first act but the second act closure - echoing a line of Alan's about the past being like a series of selfs seen at various stages - has eight Kays standing in front of eight fireplace mirrors and doing a bit of Matthew Bourne-ish 'movement' courtesy of longtime Bourne performer Scott Ambler. The last act ends with Morahan and Paul Ready as Adam appearing behind a scrim and doing more 'movement' with video images of their 1918 and 1937 selves respectively. These last two pieces of "director theatre" do not illuminate or complement the text - they only serve to show Goold's worry that a 72 year old play needs 'contextualising' for the modern viewer.

Some of the performances shone out from Goold's tricksy multi-media production.

Francesca Annis was excellent as the matriarch of the Conway clan: vain, flamboyant, flirty and when older, manipulative and emotionally cruel. Paul Ready was touching as Alan, the son doomed to live with his needy mother but the most sane of the Conways while Fenella Woolgar, while distracting with semaphore arms as the younger idealistic Madge, made the most of her character's filial loathing in the 2nd act.

Faye Castelow had the right bounciness as Carol the youngest, doomed sister and the performance from the evening came from Adrian Scarborough as the 'Lophakin' in the Conway's Cherry Orchard - totally out-of-place in their world and silently taking every one of their slights and put-downs until we find in later life that he has quietly been revenging himself on his trophy wife Hazel and ensuring the family's demise.

So... despite the director's absurd 'business' I enjoyed Priestley's Chekhovian look at lost opportunities and the banal cruelties inflicted within the family. Give me this over AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY anytime!