Estudio 1 Llama un inspector 1973

BBC Radio Drama - I Have Been Here Before by J B Priestley

Time and the Conways by J B Priestley

Priestley, J. B.  Time and the Conways. 1937.

Radio adapt. By Sue Wilson. Cast: Marcia Warren, Stella Gonet, Belinda Sinclair, Amanda Redman, Emma Fielding, John Duttine, Toby Stephens, John McArdle. (BBC Radio Drama). BBC Radio 4, 17 Sept. 1994. Online audio. YouTube (Cecily Parsley) 24 Nov. 2018.*

https://youtu.be/5iuzF7cQths

         2020

Time and the Conways by J B Priestley was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 17th September 1994 1919: A World War has just ended. The Conway family gather to celebrate daughter Kay's 21st birthday party. But 19 years later we see that the future is far from the one they imagined. Marcia Warren and Stella Gonet star in J. B. Priestley’s classic family drama about the nature of time. Time and the Conways follows the fortunes of one family over a period of years, and offers a moving perspective on the abstract nature of the past, present, and future. 


This BBC Radio production features a distinguished cast, including Marcia Warren, Stella Gonet, Belinda Sinclair, Amanda Redman, and Toby Stephens. Mrs Conway: Marcia Warren Madge: Stella Gonet Kay: Belinda Sinclair Hazel: Amanda Redman Carol: Emma Fielding Alan: John Duttine Robin: Toby Stephens Ernest Beevers: John McArdle Joan Helford: Julia Hills Gerald Thorton: Christopher Scott Mr Ackroyd: Malcolm McKee Mrs Ackroyd: Sharon Wilmott Music composed by: Malcolm McKee. Oboe: Jenny Philips Directed by Sue Wilson BBC Radio 4 FM, 17 September 1994 19.50

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BBC Radio Drama - Eden End by J B Priestley

Symbolism of dreams

A commentary to this post on J.B. Priestley's  I Have Been Here Before:

 

Martín Alegre, Sara. "Time and J. B. Priestley: I Have Been Here Before." The Joys of Teaching Literature

         https://blogs.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/2019/09/24/time-and-j-b-priestley-i-have-been-here-before/

         2019

-->
my commentary —
 
I wouldn't say that science's view on humans is merely that "we are just a random series of events." There are many levels and forms of order, both strict and partial, to go through before we reach ultimate randomness. And many sciences too, it doesn't come as a bulk sale!  Likewise, as regards the symbolism of dreams, I would argue that there IS a symbolism in them all right, only it is not "our symbolism", I mean not the symbolism that our waking selves would choose to use or recognize. Of course there are transactional translations between that symbolism and our own, e.g. Freud's, which may feel unsatisfactory to other dreamers and other interpreters, but we cannot leave it at dreams being chaotic or meaningless and that's it, we need to interpret them, and then what becomes really more symbolic for our systems to manage is the narrative of the dream, i.e. the dream once it has been modified, retold and adapted for our waking consumption. Which is not quite the same thing as the dream...

Menos multiversos

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Un articulillo mío sobre teatro y tiempo narrativo:

Time and the Conways (y la falacia narrativa)  

http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2547409

 

Analizamos la estructura narrativa del drama de J. B. Priestley Time and the Conways (1937) examinando su uso de las anacronías objetivas en relación a la estructura hermenéutica retrospectiva inherente a toda representación narrativa, que da lugar a una disjunción temporal que denominamos la "falacia narrativa".

(Time and the Conways (and the Narrative Fallacy))

English Abstract:
An analysis of the narrative structure of J. B. Priesley's drama Time and the Conways (1937). The paper analyzes its use of objective anachronies in relation to the retrospective hermeneutic structure inherent in any narrative representation, which gives rise to a temporal disjunction we dub the "narrative fallacy".

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

 

Number of Pages in PDF File: 9
Keywords: Narrative, Narrative structure, Hindsight, Hermeneutics, Narratology, J.B. Priestley, Drama, English literature, Time, Temporal structure

eJournal Classifications (Date posted: 10 Jan. 2015):
CSN Subject Matter eJournals      Cognition & the Arts eJournal - CMBO          CSN: Mental Operations (Cognition & the Arts) (Topic) - CMBO              CSN: Narrative & Story (Sub-Topic) - CMBO
LIT Subject Matter eJournals      English & Commonwealth Literature eJournal - CMBO          LIT: Twentieth-Century British Literature (Topic) - CMBO

También aquí:

_____. "Time and the Conways." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 19 March 2011.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2011/03/time-and-conways.html

         2011

_____. "Time and the Conways (y la falacia narrativa) (Time and the Conways (and the Narrative Fallacy)). SSRN 10 Jan. 2015.*

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2547409

https://ssrn.com/abstract=2547409

         2015

         Cognition & the Arts eJournal 10 Jan. 2015.*

         http://www.ssrn.com/link/Cognition-Arts.html

         2015

         English & Commonwealth Literature eJournal 10 Jan. 2015.*

         http://www.ssrn.com/link/English-Commonwealth-Lit.html

         2015

_____. "Time and the Conways (y la falacia narrativa)." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 20 Jan. 2015.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2015/01/time-and-conways-y-la-falacia-narrativa.html

         2015

_____. "Time and the Conways (y la falacia narrativa)." Academia 24 March 2016.*

         https://www.academia.edu/23665446/

         2016

_____. "Time and the Conways (y la falacia narrativa)." ResearchGate 27 March 2016.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299442361

         2016

_____. "Time and the Conways (y la falacia narrativa)." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 4 Jan. 2023.*

         https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/eltiempoylosconway.pdf

https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/timeandtheconways.pdf

https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/timeandtheconways.html

         2022

Time and the Conways

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Inter-war Drama: O'Casey, Coward, Priestley and Sherriff

From The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders:

The innovations of 'Modernism' or, more precisely, the dramatic experiments of the leading 'Modernists', touched the English theatrical mainstream in the twenty years between the two world wars only indirectly. Joyce's Exiles was rejected by the normally progressive Stage Society in London and had to await a first performance, in a German translation, at Munich in 1919. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes, published in 1932, was, somewhat bizarrely, given its first performance a year later by the women students of Vassar College in the United States. His Murder in the Cathedral was first acted in 1935 not in a London theatre but in the chapter house of Canterbury Cathedral. Of D. H. Lawrence's three remarkable, if somewhat static, explorations of working-class life—A Collier's Friday Night (written c. 1909 and published 1934), The Daughter-in-Law (1912), and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914)—only the last received of a London performance, under the auspices of the Stage Society in 1926. This performance belatedly provoked George Bernard Shaw to write that its 'torrent of profuse yet vivid dialogue' made his own seem 'archaic in comparison'. Even the redoubtable Shaw's most challenging late plays, Heartbreak House (1919) and Saint Joan (1924), received their premières in New York (though highly successful London productions of both followed within months).

The three best-known plays of Shaw's younger compatriot, Sean O'Casey (1880-1963), were shaped by the new Irish theatrical environment rather than by the demands of the more conventional London Establishment. O'Casey (born 'John Casey', and, at the peak of his association with the nationalist Gaelic League, known as 'Sean O Cathasaigh') was the last of the major early twentieth-century Irish playwrights to be associated with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. A poor Protestant Dubliner by birth, he wrote about what he knew best—the sounds, the rhetoric, the prejudices, the frustrations and the manners of tenement dwellers of the slums of the Irish capital. Unlike his Abbey predecessors he was not prepared to romanticize Ireland or to fantasize about it either its past or its bloody present. Nor was he inclined to 'poeticize' the vigorously rhythmical language of the Dublin poor. The Shadow of a Gunman (performed in Dublin in 1923 and in London in 1925) is set in a back room in 'Hilljoy' Square at the time of the 'Black and Tan' repression in 1920. The action of Juno and the Paycock (Dublin, 1924; London, 1925) also takes place in a single room in a two-room tenancy, though the period has moved forward to the time of the Irish Civil War in 1922. The Plough and the Stars, which provoked nationalist riots at the Abbey in 1926 but was more placidly received at the Fortune Theatre in London in the same year, describes the prelude to the eruption of the Easter Rising and the disjunctions of the Rising itself in 1916. Its action takes place in and around the Clitheroes' rooms 'in a fine old Georgian house struggling for its life against the assaults of time, and the more savage assaults of its tenants'. Despite the exemplary nature of O'Casey's nationalist credentials, in none of these plays does he offer apologies for the troubles of Ireland, or take sides with its oppressors or its supposed liberators. The poor are seen as caught up in a struggle that disrupts their lives rather than enhances or transfigures them. They are never dumb victims, but their very garrulousness reveals them as incomprehending and unwilling sufferers for someone else's cause. All three plays are characterized by their author as tragedies, but in all three the shadow and the reality of death is relieved by a wit which is as instinctive as it is irreverent. This ambiguity is to some degree exemplified in Juno and the Paycock in Jack Boyle's blusteringly reiterated reflection that 'the whole world's in a state o'chassis'. In The Shadow of a Gunman the theme of deception and self-deception, taken up from Synge's rural Playboy of the Western World  (1907) is played ironically back in a revolutionary, urban setting. The play's title is itself ambiguous. Gunmen on both sides overshadow the characters, but the gunman of the play is a sham. It is not this supposed warrior, the 'poet and poltroon' Donal Daoren, who dies violently, but the girl who looks upon him as a hero, the 'Helen of Troy come to live in a tenement', Minnie Powell. The conflict between bravado and bravery and between swaggering and fighting also determines the complex interactions of The Plough and the Stars. The assaulted tenement is both partially detached from the political struggle taking place beyond its walls and inextricably bound up in its confusions, injustices, and bloody accidents (again it is the woman, the otherwise impressively resilient Bessie Burgess, who is the victim). When O'Casey's experimental comment on the First World War, the 'Tragi-Comedy' The Silver Tassie, was rejected by the Abbey Theatre, O'Casey found a London theatre for its première in 1928 (he himself had already moved to England two years earlier). With Charles Laughton in the lead role and with scenery for the stylized expressionism of Act II designed by the painter Augustus John, The Silver Tassie seemed set to launch the dramatist on a new phase in his career. Its accentuated paradoxes, and the jerky contrast between the naturalism of its first and fourth acts and the exposed alienation of its middle two, in reality merely formed a prelude to the uncertainty, the awkwardness, and the socialist rhetoric of his later work. Neither Red Roses for Me (1943) nor the gesturing anti-clerical, anti-capitalist analyses of modern Ireland, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949) and The Bishop's Bonfire (1955) managed to recall the tense, unsentimental energy of his Abbey plays.

The work of the most representative English dramatist of the period, Noël Coward (1899-1973), contrasts vividly with that of O'Casey. Coward combined the talents of actor, composer, librettist, playwright, and poseur, and his long career allowed each aspect a more than ample expression. After uncertain theatrical beginnings in the immediately post-war years he achieved a double succès de scandale in 1924 with The Vortex, a high-flown exploration of the condition of drug-addict tormented by his slovenly mother's adulteries, and the equally melodramatic The Rat Trap, a study of the miserable marriage of a playwright and his novelist-wife. In what must have seemed to audiences an abrupt change of style, in 1925 Coward produced Hay Fever. This elegantly malicious comedy, in which absurdity meets incomprehension, exposes both the eccentric, self-centered rudeness of the Bliss family and the bafflement of their conservative guests. His subsequent smartly packaged excursions into Ruritania—The Queen was in the Parlour (1926), The Marquise (1927), and the musical comedy Bitter Sweet (1929)—though vastly well-received in their time, effectively loooked back nostalgically to the lost enchantments of the Edwardian theatre. In his three major plays of the early 1930s, however, Coward glanced freshly at the problems of the immediate past and the incereasingly uneasy present. The elaborately staged Cavalcade (1931) traces the fortunes and opinions of the Marryot family in twenty-one short scenes covering the years 1899-1930 and includes episodes set variously in drawing-rooms, theatres, bar parlours, railway stations, and even on board the Titanic. It concludes with two contrasting scenes, the first of which shows its now aged central characters toasting the future in the hope that 'this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again'. The second, called, 'Twentieth Century Blues', takes place in a nightclub and intermixes a song about 'chaos and confusion', popular dance, wounded war-veterans making baskets, and the cacophonous sounds of loudspeakers, jazz bands, and aeroplane propellers. The 'angular and strange effect' that Coward sought at the end of Cavalcade is minimally reflected in the dialogue of his two comic studies of fraught marital relationships, Private Lives (1930) and Design for Living (1933), though, alas, neither play ultimately fulfils the psychological promise of the situations Coward wittily establishes. The limited ambitions of both were summed up in 1931 in their author's insistence that 'the primary and dominant object of the theatre is to amuse people, not to reform or edify them'. His last great success, Blithe Spirit, written in five days in 1941, ran for 1,997 performances in the West End of London (a record for a non-musical play in its time) as well as touring the provinces. It offered an essential escape from the preoccupations of the 'Home Front' in the Second World War, though it included, through the ethereal presence of Elvira and the spiritual interference of Madame Arcati, the reassurance to families parted by the war that death did not necessarily mark the end of a relationship.

J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley (1894-1984), like Coward one of the most familiar and popular figures of the realm of propagandist entertainment during the Second World War, established his reputation as a novelist with The Good Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930). The first, an account of the vagaries of the life of a travelling theatrical troupe, was successfully dramatized (with the aid of Edward Knoblock) in 1931. It opened the floodgates to Priestley's career as a dramatist in his own right, a career which ultimately included more than forty plays. His stance as a no-nonsense populist and professional Yorkshireman, so self-consciously cultivated in his wartime radio broadcasts (published under the confident titles Britain Speaks (1940) and All England Listened (1968), belied his genuine sophistication and dedication as an artist and critic. His best-remembered and most commonly revived plays, Time and the Conways (1937), When We Are Married (1938), and the mystery An Inspector Calls (1947) show  a mastery of the conventional 'well-made' form and a tolerant sporting with human folly. The two comedies in particular tend to reinforce the virtues of common sense and stolidity rather than to challenge preconceptions as to the nature of society or the role of the theatre.

R(obert) C(edric) Sherriff's distinctly unreassuring dramatic account of life in the trenches of the First World War in Journey's End was translated from the Apollo Theatre (where it had been produced in December 1928 by the Stage Society) to the Savoy in January 1929. It ran for 594 performances before transferring to yet another West End theatre. Sherriff (1896-1975) never wrote anything more striking (though he had some later success in the theatre and with screenplays for the film-director Alexander Korda). Journey's End combines realism with the kind of restraint which is expressive of far more than the stiff-upper-lip heroics of idealized British officers. Its novelty lay in its stark portrayal of male relationships strained by an uncomfortable intimacy with discomfort, physical dissolution, and death. It brought a frank representation of wastage and violence to the London theatre which served as effectively as Wilfred Owen's posthumously published poetry to stir unreconciled and unhappy emotions in ex-soldiers and to exemplify the pity of war to those who had not been required to fight.

 

An Introduction to Time and the Conways

 

—oOo—

An Introduction to TIME AND THE CONWAYS

—by E. R. Wood

E. R. Wood's introduction to J. B. Priestley's play Time and the Conways (London: Heinemann, 1964).


John Boynton Priestley was born in Bradford in 1894, the son of a schoolmaster. On leaving school he went to work in the local wool trade, and at the age of sixteen he was already writing pieces for Bradford newspapers. He served in the army throughout the war of 1914-1918, and on demobilization in 1919 he was awarded a government grant which enabled him to go to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. At the university he supplemented his grant by writing, and after taking his degree he settled in London to make literature his profession.

He achieved a series of reputations in different spheres. At first he was a literary critic and essayist; among his early books were The English Comic Characters, The English Novel, and scholarly biographies of Peacock and Meredith. Next he began to write novels, and in 1929 everybody was reading and praising The Good Companions, which made him famous all over the world. Over the next thirty years this was followed by a score of successful novels. Then in 1932 he began a new career—as a dramatist. Dangerous Corner was the first of some twenty-five plays covering a wide range, from popular comedy such as When We Are Married to ambitiously experimental dramas like Johnson Over Jordan and Music at Night. In the 'thirties J. B. Priestley was deeply involved at the very heart of the theatre world; he became a theatre director, closely associated with the most prominent actors and directors; he even took over once, at twenty-four hours' notice, the leading part in When We Are Married. At this time he was determined to give the public something more than the conventional 'West End success'; to make them feel or think more deeply and more originally; and at the same time to hold his own financially in the theatre industry. He had some disappointments, but on the whole his plays were very popular.

During the last war he established a new reputation, this time as a broadcaster; by his Postscripts to the Sunday night news bulletins he did much to sustain the people's spirit with his forthright common sense and humanity, and the BBC's Overseas service made his personality well-known over the world. After the war he was chosen as a delegate to U.N.E.S.C.O.

He has written film scripts and television plays, books about his travels and books about peple, as well as many articles on public affairs. He is well-known in America. Among his most recent works are The Art of the Dramatist and Literature and Western Man, which recall the academic bent of his early years.

He is married to Jacquetta Hawkes, the archaeologist and writer, with whom he has written Dragon's Mouth and Journey Down a Rainbow. They live near Stratford on Avon. J. B. Priestley's political sympathies have always been towards the Left, but his mind is too independent for party ties. He was one of the people who initiated the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but he has not been so actively engaged in the movement as has Jacquetta Hawkes.

His powerful personality adds vigour to everything he writers; he is never dull. In the preface to Delight, a collection of short essays on the things in life he enjoys, he says that he is often considered to be 'too blunt, brusque and downright difficult', but he protests, 'Actually I am amiable and rather shy.' His essays and more personal writings give the impression of a zest for life as it is, combined with a reformer's idea of what it might be and a philosopher's awareness of its mystery. All these qualities can be seen in Time and the Conways.



Time and Mr Priestley

J. B. Priestley has long been fascinated by the riddle of Time, and he has been much influenced by the theories of J. W. Dunne and others. As long ago as 1927 Dunne published a book called An Experiment with Time, which was followed by The Serial Universe. People have always told stories of seeing into the future in dreams or trances: Dunne systematically recorded dreams immediately on waking, and after studying his records he came to the conclusion that in dreaming we foretell future events about as often as we recall the past. There are obvious reasons why we are not all aware of this. First, the events of the past, present and future are so disguised and distorted in dreams as to be often difficult to recognize. Second, most of our dreams are immediately frogotten. According to Dunne, the uncanny sensation, familiar to many people, that something is happening or about to happen that has already happened once is due to dimly recalling a forgotten dream of the future at the moment when it comes true. Thus you may dream of a place that you have never seen, and when at some later date you visit that place for the first time in your waking life, you may say with certainty, but in bewilderment, 'I have been here before.'

An Experiment with Time begins with a large accumulation of evidence of apparent awareness of the future in dreams or peculiar waking states, and goes on to an enquiry into the Time factor in existence and a presentation of the theory of the Universe which Dunne calls Serialism. This part of the book is abstruse and not easy reading; for the appreciation of Time and the Conways it is unnecessary to understand the theory in detail. Here is a brief summary of it, written by J. B. Priestley, showing its appreciation to Time and the Conways:

On this theory of Time we are each of us a series of observers in a corresponding series of Times, and it is only as Observer One in Time One that we can be said to die, the subsequent observers being immortal. Mr Dunne had been led to work out this theory by his discovery, which I for one believe to be valid, that frequently in dreams the future is revealed to us. His explanation is that in dreams, when we are no longer functioning as Observer One, it is our Observer Two who catches a glimpse of events that await our Observer One in Time One. Thus in a dream, Observer Two often focuses together events that belong both to the past and to the future of Oberver One; and as this Observer Two has a four-dimensional outlook, quite different from that of Observer One, our dream experiences are startingly different from our waking life.

And now for Time and the Conways. Some simple souls have declared that this play is a lot of fuss about nothing and merely has the third act played where the second act ought to be and then the real second act put last. This is of course a ridiculous criticism. It should be noticed that Kay Conway is never off the stage throughout Act II, although she is frequently absent in Acts I and III. The reason is of course that Act II is really Kay's glimpse of the future, or, to put it in terms of Serialism, it is Kay's Observer Two who sees what will happen, years ahead, to her Observer One. Alone, quiet after much excitement, the girl has a vision of a scene in the future, and Act II is that vision. Then Act III takes up the story of the young Kay from Act I, but Kay herself, with her Observer Two still awake and half remembering, is now different from what she was in Act I; hence her appeal to Alan at the end of the play.
(Preface to Three Time Plays).

 

 

Time and the Conways

Even if Dunne's theory of Time is rejected, Time and the Conways remains an imaginative and moving play, which gains much by having 'the third act played where the second ought to be'. The events of Act III are full of poignant dramatic irony when we already know from Act II what is to happen to all the eagerness and gay promise of the Conway family. It appears here that Time is the great enemy that destroys the hope of the young. In Act I we are shown how exciting and inspiring a big family can be, so that Kay can say, 'I think life's wonderful.' Twenty years later Mrs Conway says:

I used to see myself at the age I am now, surrounded by you and your own children, so proud of you, so happy with you all, this house happier and gayer even than it was in the best of the old days. And now my life's gone by, and what's happened? You're a resentful, soured schoolmistress, middle-aged before your time. Hazel—the loveliest child there ever was—married to a vulgar little bully, and terrified of him. Kay here—gone away to lead her own life, and very bitter and secretive about it, as if she'd failed. Carol—the happiest and kindest of you all—dead before she's twenty. Robin—I know, y dear, I'm not blaming you know, but I must speak the truth for once—with a wife he can't love and no sort of position or comfort or anything. And Alan—the eldest, the boy his father adored, that he thought might do anything—what's he now? A miserable clerk with no prospects, no ambitions, no self-respect, a shabby little man that nobody would look at twice.

Of course, Mrs Conway is a bad judge of character, who ignores her own responsibility for much of what has happened, but this is a rough summing-up of what Time has brought to the family. Kay says to Alan:

Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Alan, it's us. Every step we've taken—every tick of the clock—making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like Carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Alan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.

It is a gloomy picture, but the play contains a message of comfort. According to Dunne's theory, the later, darker stages in the life of the Conway family do not cancel out or supersede the earlier, happier days; both times are different aspects of the essential Conway existence which was, is, and will be. Alan attempts to expound the view of Time which he has read in 'a book'—no doubt An Experiment with Time. He says that Time does not destroy; it 'merely moves on—in this life—from one peephole to the next'. For the benefit of those who do not accept or cannot follow this reassurance, the author also provides, through Alan, the message of Blake:

Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Safely through the world we go...

In Blake's lines this thought seems to acquire a serene wisdom that sets life's disappointments and Time's blows in a scheme of things that we can face with grave resignation. Dunne's theory can then be thought of as no more than an imaginative stimulus and an effective theatrical framework.

The rearrangement of the time-sequence reinforces our appreciation of the play on another plane—that of the development of character. The troubles that come upon the Conways are not all the product of Time and changing fortune: fate is also moulded by character. In most plays we are accustomed to the last act presenting the final stages of a character's development and to looking back to recall earlier indications of what is to be. In Time and the Conways we form impressions of the characters in the pleasant atmosphere of Act I; then we suffer a harsh shock when in Act II we see them nearly twenty years later; finally we are able to see in Act III the seeds of future unhappiness being sown by people whom we had judged too superficially in the first act. In the light of what we know they will become, we now see their weaknesses. There is bitter irony in such ambitions as Hazel's: 'I shall marry a tall, a rather good-looking man .  .. and he'll have plenty of money and be very fond of travel, and we'll go all over the world together but have a house in London .  . . I couldn't possibly spend the rest of my life here. I'd die.'  Similarly Robin's aspirations are the more revealing when we know what is to become of him: 'I'm going to do something. And none of this starting-at-the-bottom-of-the-ladder, pushing-a-pen-in-the-corner business either. This is a time when young men get a chance, and I'm going to take it.' The person who most obviously brings on herself in Act III the unhappiness of Act II is Mrs Conway. She makes an enemy of Ernest Beevers and ruthlessly shatters Madge's relationship with Gerald. For all her charm, her behaviour is unforgivable, and it is not forgiven.

J. B. Priestley succeeds in making us care what happens to the Conway family, whom we come to know and understand, with a mixture of liking and sympathy and disapproval. But the interest of the play extends beyond a particular family: what happens in the play to the Conways actually happened to a whole generation in the twenty years between the wars. The slump that followed the post-war boom hit some classes harder than others; but the collapse of material prosperity suffered by Mrs Conway was a fate common to many property-owners. After the optimism of 1919, disillusionment was universal. The spirit of 1919, with its promise of 'a free, prosperous, happy people, all enjoying equal opportunities, living at peace with the whole world', sounds like grim mockery after the years of slump and unemployment, with Hitler and Mussolini successfully defying the League of Nations, and the prospect of a new World War in everyone's mind. Of the Conways, only Alan, who never hoped for much, suggests a way to take the rough with the smooth.

Time and the Conways

 

—oOo—

El tiempo y los Conway / Time and the Conways

 

Fuimos ayer a ver una buena sesión de teatro en el Principal, El Tiempo y los Conway, de J. B. Priestley. Un trailer del montaje hay en YouTube.  






Además de trailers, los montajes teatrales tienen ahora Facebooks como este. Mirad por ejemplo las fotos de la representación.

 Para orientarse, les diré que la obra está entre Strindberg y Pinter, tanto cronológica como estéticamente—o anímicamente. La señora Conway se resiste a envejecer, pero el tiempo pasa para ella y para su familia numerosa, unos años tras la muerte del Sr. Conway. La obra contrasta dos momentos a dos décadas de distancia, el final de la Primera Guerra Mundial, con el optimismo de la juventud, las expectativas del futuro, los sueños de éxito, proyectos de amores y de parejas, y de carreras exitosas... y, veinte años después, tras la Crisis y los conflictivos años 30, al borde de una nueva guerra, los personajes envejecidos, desilusionados y alejados unos de otros por la muerte, el olvido, la dejadez, los intereses económicos, la falta de apego, el fracaso vital, profesional y amoroso. Es un poco la Historia de una escalera de Buero Vallejo (y ese tipo de teatro también, clásico y a la vez moderno, al borde de lo experimental). El contraste irónico entre dos momentos separados por la obra del tiempo aparece, claro, en muchas otras obras, de distinta manera—por ejemplo en Krapp's Last Tape, de Samuel Beckett, donde son unas cintas magnetofónicas que oye el protagonista lo que permite contrastar al joven Krapp con el viejo que escucha las cintas.

Una peculiaridad sí tenía Time and the Conways cuando se estrenó, y es que es de las poquísimas obras de teatro que contienen un flashforward. La escena situada en 1938 ocupa el acto central (o la escena central—en el montaje de ayer no separaban actos)—y las escenas de 1919 son la primera y la segunda parte de una misma velada, una fiesta de cumpleaños. Los Conway, ayer familia pudiente, tienen crisis financiera, y salen a la luz las tensiones a la hora de poner orden en los ingresos de su madre y en las propiedades que han de heredar. La reunión para hablar de las finanzas y herencias tiene un cierto ambiente de Huis clos. La hija más joven, Carol, llena de ilusión por el futuro en el primer acto, hace años que ha muerto; pocas veces piensan ya en ella los demás. Unos son solterones frustrados; otros, parejas prometedoras de enamorados en el primer acto, son ahora matrimonios fracasados. Los sueños de Kay de ser una gran escritora han quedado en nada (aunque aún los acaricia...) y es periodista, escribe para sobrevivir sin más, no crea nada. Su hermana, Madge, ahora muy distante de todos, es una profesora frustrada y solitaria, cuya máxima ambición es llegar a directora... la madre aún está fuerte de carácter, pero se ha distanciado de sus hijos, y su carácter caprichoso y arbitrario se ha acentuado con los años. Alan, el mayor, es un mediocre funcionario, aunque tiene cierta paz de espíritu, y en un momento de desesperación de su hermana la "escritora", le recita unos versos de Blake para consolarla: la vida está hecha de alegría y pena entretejidas, y cuando sabemos que unas y otras van necesariamente unidas, vemos el mundo con mayor seguridad. 
 

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro' the World we safely go.
Joy and Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

Le expone además Alan a Kay la teoría del tiempo de la obra: siendo lo que somos, seremos lo que lleguemos a ser, y todos nuestros seres pasados conviven con nosotros a la vez, los llevamos encima. Nada se pierde (noción idealista, claro) y presente, pasado y futuro coexisten, con sus alegrías y penas. Sólo cuando somos ancianos conoceremos el conjunto de alegrías y penas de nuestra vida, pero debemos saber que a un nivel, coexiste con nosotros nuestra juventud ilusionada, en un tiempo más allá de ese tiempo en el que creemos estar.

Es la teoría del tiempo como un todo simultáneo, que expuso J. W. Dunne en su libro An Experiment with Time, y antes que él H. G. Wells en La Máquina del Tiempo— una idea ya implícita en la idea de la vida como texto, a la vez secuencial y simultáneo. Aquí la utiliza Priestley como hipótesis o experimento mental con el tiempo, al parecer creyendo en ella personalmente—si bien utilizó otras concepciones del tiempo en otras obras de sus "Time Plays." Para Alan, o para el espectador ideal de la obra, todo está transcurriendo a la vez, una manera de pensar que facilita los viajes mentales a otras épocas de nuestra vida, sabiendo que están cuidadosamente almacenados en la eternidad. A esta visión consoladora hay que contrastar la realidad de lo que nos muestra la obra: las ilusiones y pesares no van bien mezclados en la vida, o en esta obra: la juventud y 1919 son casi todo ilusión y alegría, y 1938 es todo pesar y penar. Quizá Alan, frustrado en su amor en la velada de 1919, es el único que vea las cosas así. Y tras este acto penoso, en el que la familia se reúne quizá por última vez, volvemos a ver a los personajes tal y como eran en 1919, embarcándose en las ilusiones que ahora sabemos destinadas al fracaso.

La sensación de retrospección irónica del espectador está aumentada, como he dicho, por la alteración del orden cronológico. Estas "anacronías" como las llamaba Genette, son mucho más frecuentes en la novela, o en el cine, pero prácticamente inexistentes en el teatro (al menos las anacronías "objetivas", las que no se presentan en el discurso de los personajes sino como una reorganización autorial de la línea narrativa principal). Esto convertiría a esta obra en un caso llamativo, quizá influenciada por la experiencia de la cinematografía. Pero una perspectiva irónica sobre el tiempo puede generarse, de maneras muy distintas, y quizá la más frecuente, que contribuye a que El tiempo y los Conway no sea muy diferente de cualquier otra obra en este sentido, es la que se da cuando conocemos ya una obra—la segunda representación, efectiva o imaginada, produce el mismo efecto de contraste irónico entre los actos y sus consecuencias. Cualquier narración se basa en este contraste, implícito si no explícito, entre lo que se sabe en el presente y lo que se creía saber en el pasado—la narración se basa en desvelar los secretos que guarda el tiempo sobre todas sus provincias: sobre el futuro, sobre el pasado, o sobre aquel presente ahora pasado.

La herencia del teatro clásico evitaba las alteraciones en el orden de la representación con una rigidez realmente pasmosa: es quizá la herencia de la poética aristotélica en parte, pero en realidad, toda una tradición de lo que se ha entendido por teatro no es ya que rechazase, sino que ni siquiera se planteaba el que el orden de la historia representada no dictase el orden de la representación. (Una rigidez mental o formal que evidentemente no se aplicaba a las narraciones verbales dentro del drama, como tampoco se suponía de manera tan rígida que la duración de una escena hubiese de dictar la duración de su representación). La alteración del orden narrativo en el drama parecía más que ofensiva, inconcebible para los dramaturgos clásicos, los previos al siglo XX. Y sin embargo es una manera muy vívida de contrastar cuestiones relativas al desarrollo del carácter, o al éxito o fracaso (en este caso) de planes y proyectos de vida, al margen de ser un experimento interesante con el tiempo "vivido al revés"—pero siempre lo vivimos al revés, pues representar el tiempo pasado es sacarlo de su momento y contrastarlo implícitamente con el presente. Toda narración, decíamos, es una máquina del tiempo, y un agente de lo que podemos llamar la falacia narrativa, entendiendo por falacia esa manera "imposible" y a la vez muy típicamente humana de superponer y contrastar presente y pasado, y ver en qué van a parar las cosas, viéndolas desde la atalaya de la retrospección.


Aquí, en El tiempo y los Conway, el contraste entre los dos tiempos no se da únicamente a nivel de la manipulación "olímpica" de la anacronía objetiva hecha por el autor; este nivel de reorganización "autorial" se infiltra por así decirlo en la acción misma, y contamina de una angustia por el futuro la percepción de uno de los personajes, la escritora Kay—que tiene una sensación, o visión imperfecta del futuro, que coincide con el segundo acto de la obra. Por tanto este segundo acto también queda psicologizado, no es sólo una "presentación objetiva" que sea única responsabilidad del autor, a espaldas de sus personajes. Tal vez le pareció a Priestley demasiado cruel el presentarlos totalmente ciegos a la realidad de lo que sería.  

Por suerte se nos ahorra la visión de los mismos personajes, tras otros veinte años, sesentones y con menos ilusiones si cabían—porque siempre caben menos de las que hay, y siempre hay escamas en los ojos—pero ese lado de la vida ya se lo dejamos a Beckett.



El tiempo y los Conway. J. B. Priestley (1937). Con dirección y escenografía de Juan Carlos Pérez de la Fuente, e interpretada por Lusia Martín (Sra. Conway), Nuria Gallardo (Kay), Alejandro Tous (Alan), Juan Díaz (Robin), Chusa Barbero (Madge), Débora Izaguirre (Hazel), Ruth Salas (Carol), Alba Alonso (Joan Helford), Román Sánchez Gregory (Ernest Beevers) y Toni Martínez (Gerald Thornton).

Negra espalda del tiempo