This guide is written for teachers and students who are studying J.B. Priestley's play Time and the Conways. The guide is written specifically for students in the UK, but I hope it may be helpful to users from other parts of the world. Time and the Conways is sometimes set as a text for assessed work in drama for English and English literature exams. It may also be studied for teacher-assessed coursework in English in Key Stages 3 and 4 (GCSE reading).

Launching off of this, there can be a meta reading of Time and the Conways. The non-meta reading: By reorganizing the chronology of this family, Priestley distances the audience from the characters. While the characters are trapped seeing just the immediate present, the audience can see the whole stretch of time, and they can spot all the pitfalls that these characters, and all of Europe, will fall into, snatching and grabbing and hurting each other. The Conway children, who number six, individually divulge their hopes and plans for the future, so far as they've made any at all. These mostly comprise expectations of marital bliss with the right partner but one daughter plans to be a novelist, another a social campaigner while the youngest and least affected of their number, the bright 18-year-old Carol dreams of the stage but most of all just living her life to the full. Priestley’s interest in the nature of time fuelled the writing of this play in 1937, in which he explores the idea that our present and our future exist simultaneously, rather than one being an unalterable consequence of the other. He wraps up this notion in the story of the wealthy Conway family, whom we meet in 1919 as daughter Kay is celebrating her 21st birthday with a night of parlour games in the family home, along with her mother and siblings. Life is rosy; son Robin has just left the army and returned home, and each of the four Conway daughters has reason to believe in a bright future. Only their bookish, stuttering brother Alan (Paul Ready) seems fixed in the present, rather than yearning for the rewards of the future. But at the end of act one, Hattie Morahan’s Kay has a vision of the life that awaits them, and it is considerably less palatable than they like to imagine.Madge arrives, explaining that she has only come because she was in the neighbourhood, being interviewed for a job as headmistress of a girls' school. She insists that she has no connection with the person she once was, and dismisses Alan's attempt to contradict her: at the end of the act he will explain his ideas to Kay. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( October 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Briefly show how both authors represent people as reaping what they sow, and how far it may be possible to escape the consequences of one's earlier actions. Another way of doing this would be to consider the stories in terms of past and present: the present consequences of past actions. Domestic Abuse: The details stay offstage, but in 1937 Hazel is clearly terrified of her abusive husband Ernest.

For a final flourish, once you've done enough nicing, you might want to close with this characteristically recherché quibble from Nightingale. "Why," he asks, "must Francesca Annis, playing the Conway matriarch, suddenly transform herself from a blithely overbearing, sublimely tactless Ranevskaya into a rasping Medea?" But you're going to have to Google those yourself.The play is concerned very much with the author's ideas about time, but the structure of the play shows the relation between different periods in the characters' lives, by presenting these in an odd time-sequence: the first and last acts take place in a short continuous period on the same day, while the second act occurs nineteen years later to the day (Kay's birthday). To understand how the promise of the first act has led to the unhappiness of the second, we are given further information in the third act, which makes this clear. In 1919, Hazel’s first reaction to Ernest Beevers - based purely on his name, before they meet - is to joke that "I’m sorry for his wife if he has one". In 1937, she’s unhappily married to him and very scared of her husband. Synopsis 'Time and the Conways’ by JB Priestley 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. It is 1919, the War is over and the Conway family are celebrating their daughter Kay’s 21st birthday. But her sudden premonition of their lives in 1937 casts a shadow over their dreams and expectations. This BBC Radio production features a distinguished cast including Marcia Warren, Stella Gonet, Belinda Sinclair, Amanda Redman and Toby Stephens. Series Classic Radio Theatre, Series Language English Country Great Britain Year of release 1994 Notes Originally broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 12 August 1994. Subjects Drama Credits Writer J B Priestley Cast Amanda Redman Carol Conway, the youngest child. Sixteen years old as the play begins, she is energetic and charming, without the social affectations seen in most of the family. She is also very morbid and is obsessed with thoughts of death, particularly with memories of her father’s drowning. She is the only member of the family who welcomes Ernest Beevers into their social circle. Carol dies young, and her death symbolizes the loss of vitality and goodness in the Conways. A new BBC Radio 3 adaptation was broadcast on 14 September 2014[13] with Harriet Walter as Mrs. Conway, Anna Madeley as Kay, Rupert Evans as Alan and Michael Bertenshaw as J. B. Priestley.[citation needed]

Quijada's piece combines a series of metatheatrical (and not very funny) jokes about a supposed series of disasters in the theatre, an injury to a dancer etc, with a dance style and a musical score which are observably influenced by US street culture. Competing solos, confrontational choreography, and the clash between hip-hop and European classical music sometimes make the piece seem like a postmodern West Side Story. Often physically virtuosic, the work has its moments of tension, vulnerability, pathos and poignancy. Frustratingly, however, these are overwhelmed by its self-ironising postmodernism, which not only irritates but also (in the passages of speech) reminds us that dancers are not actors. Act Two plunges us into the shattered lives of the Conways exactly eighteen years later. Gathering in the same room where they were celebrating in Act One we see how their lives have failed in different ways. Robin has become a dissolute travelling salesman, estranged from his wife Joan, Madge has failed to realise her socialist dreams, Carol is dead, Hazel is married to the sadistic but wealthy Ernest. Kay has succeeded to a certain extent as an independent woman but has not realised her dreams of novel writing. Worst of all, Mrs Conway's fortune has been squandered, the family home is to be sold and the children's inheritance is gone. As the Act unfolds resentments and tensions explode and the Conways are split apart by misery and grief. Only Alan, the quietest of the family, seems to possess a quiet calm. In the final scene of the Act, Alan and Kay are left on stage and, as Kay expresses her misery Alan suggests to her that the secret of life is to understand its true reality – that the perception that Time is linear and that we have to grab and take what we can before we die is false. If we can see Time as eternally present, that at any given moment we are seeing only 'a cross section of ourselves,' then we can transcend our suffering and find no need to hurt or have conflict with other people. But, unwittingly, Goold also exposes a weakness in Priestley's play: that its mysticism often seems like an extra ingredient rather than something that grows organically from the text. Mrs. Conway, a widow living in a provincial town. She is in her mid-forties at the start of the play and is well dressed, talkative, and very conscious of her status in local society. She is at her best at parties and other social gatherings; she has little practical knowledge or talent. Her behavior as a mother is a central concern in the play. The promising lives of her children are shown to be wasted, and she herself faces financial ruin at the end of the play.

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The play opened onBroadwayat the Ritz Theatre on 3 January 1938, and closed on 29 January 1938, and starred Sybil Thorndike. [6] Time and the Conways is one of the Time Plays in which the writer explores the outer reaches of physics and the ideas of J.W.Dunne. In the most simplified form, he believed that, rather than being linear, time, like geography, happens all at once but in different spaces. Time and the Conways (1937), which explores J. W. Dunne's theory of simultaneous time expounded in the book An Experiment with Time; The final act continues where the first leaves off, but it is shadowed, made far bleaker by what has come immediately before. In Act Two, Priestley leaps ahead to the family as they will be in 1937, the year the play was written. The idealistic Madge - perfectly pitched by Fenella Woolgar, who is first seen expatiating her socialist principles, hands on hips in a velvet evening gown - has put on tweeds and become a bossy schoolmistress. The novelist has wizened into a journalist. The beauty is bullied. One of the sibs is dead. These look not like avoidable futures (which is the case in An Inspector Calls) but like destinies. Priestley seems to have been so cross with his characters for their strangled vowels and limited social outlooks that he's doomed them.

Act Two plunges us into the shattered lives of the Conways exactly twenty years later. Gathering in the same room where they were celebrating in Act One we see how their lives have failed in different ways. Robin has become a dissolute travelling salesman, estranged from his wife Joan, Madge has failed to realise her socialist dreams, Carol is dead, Hazel is married to the sadistic but wealthy Ernest. Kay has succeeded to a certain extent as an independent woman but has not realised her dreams of novel writing. Worst of all, Mrs Conway’s fortune has been squandered, the family home is to be sold and the children’s inheritance is gone. As the Act unfolds resentments and tensions explode and the Conways are split apart by misery and grief. Only Alan, the quietest of the family, seems to possess a quiet calm. In the final scene of the Act, Alan and Kay are left on stage and, as Kay expresses her misery Alan suggests to her that the secret of life is to understand its true reality – that the perception that Time is linear and that we have to grab and take what we can before we die is false. If we can see Time as eternally present, that at any given moment we are seeing only ‘a cross section of ourselves,’ then we can transcend our suffering and find no need to hurt or have conflict with other people. ESPAÑOL: Junto conThe play works on the level of a universal human tragedy and a powerful portrait of the history of Britain between the Wars. Priestley shows how through a process of complacency and class arrogance, Britain allowed itself to decline and collapse between 1919 and 1937, instead of realizing the availability of immense creative and humanistic potential accessible during the post-war (theGreat War) generation. Priestley could clearly see the tide of history leading towards another major European conflict as he has his character Ernest comment in 1937 that they are coming to ‘the next war’. A BBC Radio 4 adaptation was directed by Sue Wilson and broadcast on 12 August 1994 (later re-broadcast on 23 May 2010 over BBC Radio 7). The cast included Marcia Warren as Mrs. Conway, Belinda Sinclair as Kay, John Duttine as Alan, Toby Stephens as Robin, Emma Fielding as Carol, Stella Gonet as Madge, Amanda Redman as Hazel, John McArdle as Ernest and Christopher Scott as Gerald. [12]