Tom Georgeson on When We Are Married and profile of JB Priestley
March 18, 2009
While Tom Georgeson describes acting as a “lovely job” in general, he seems to regard the role of Henry Ormonroyd as a bit of a treat. “Mine is a real bouncy, fun part,” he explains. “He’s the balance in the play – the other voice. It’s been said that he’s JB Priestley’s voice and, to a certain extent, I think that he is, except that he’s pissed throughout the play. I don’t think Priestley would have been pissed, but the fact that Ormonroyd’s drunk enables him to say things that wouldn’t normally be said.”
Liquor-loosened Ormonroyd is the photographer who tactfully imparts his wisdom to three status-sensitive middle class couples that have gathered to celebrate their respective silver wedding anniversaries in Bradford-born Priestley’s When We Are Married (1938). Set in the fictional West Riding town of Clecklewyke, this jaunty, farcical satire of married life and the British fixation with class and etiquette is now being produced jointly by the West Yorkshire and Liverpool Playhouses, with WYP artistic director Ian Brown at the reins and Les Dennis as the domestically oppressed Herbert Soppitt. Liverpudlian Georgeson, however, sees the attitude that it ultimately displays toward Priestley’s fellow Yorkshiremen as affectionate: “It’s very touching. He understands people, especially Yorkshire people. Because he’s one of the great Yorkshiremen, he’s allowed to laugh at his fellow Yorkshiremen, and he does it with great heart and love.”
Although the play ridicules the values of a specific society at a specific time, he observes, this doesn’t mean that it now feels outdated or irrelevant. Indeed, this train of thought would misconstrue the play. “Particulars will have altered, but I don’t think that the essence of relationships, which is what it’s about, will be altered,” he argues. “The possibility of divorce or separating is less awful, but it doesn’t alter the essence of relationships and people that he gets to. Human relations, that’s what it’s about.” Furthermore, Georgeson, whose career to date has primarily been in film and television, believes that the play’s targets aren’t as exclusively English as they might initially appear: “I’m sure that the French could tell the same story. In fact, they do – a lot of their greatest films are about the middle class, the bourgeoisie.”
I ask Georgeson how important the provincial setting, with the narrow, distorted values that this fosters, is as a comic vehicle. “A lot of the humour that Priestley finds is in the parochial pomposity that the figures get from how they’ve come up in the world,” he replies, “social climbing in England. He’s talking about how, when they get up there, they look down on everyone beneath them. But, as he says in the play, ‘We’re all humans in the end – why are you doing all this to get a bit better off? Be nice to people!’ So there’s a socialist heart in the didactics of it.”
Georgeson’s consummately Scouse interpretation of the play as having a “socialist heart” is something he raises several times during our interview. It certainly gains currency from the traditional portrait of Priestley, who wrote for his local Labour Party weekly, the Bradford Pioneer, as a young man, depicted shocking living conditions in his book English Journey (1933), saw his 1940 radio show ‘Postscripts’ banned after he lambasted the poverty and unemployment that returning soldiers faced and inspired the formation of the CND through an article for the New Statesman in 1957. I pose the question of whether this dimension of the play will prompt different responses from audiences in Leeds, predominantly a liberal city, and Liverpool, generally seen as a solidly socialist one. “It’s an interesting question,” he muses. “The audiences in Liverpool will be totally different, but the politics aren’t that specific. You don’t sit up and say ‘Wow, this is very political’, but everything is political in the end. The manners of politics will be recognised – they still go on. People will recognise how these figures have got to where they are. I said to Ian, ‘I’d like to do a version of this set in Surrey’, because the same thing happens even more down there. I live in Surrey and meet these characters in modern life. Getting on is part of English society, and bollocks to everybody else that you’ve left behind. It’s a barrier to be broken down, I think.”
Perhaps part of the satisfaction or pleasure in playing Ormonroyd consists in his being the voice not only for Priestley’s criticism of British society, but also his suggested remedies. Whatever the case, Georgeson implies that part of the reason the play is uplifting despite portraying people with damagingly skewed priorities is that it follows the now largely abandoned tradition of proposing solutions as well as publicising problems. “A well rounded play used to end with a conclusion that implied, ‘This is how it should be’,” he says. “Shakespeare does that. Priestley draws what are, in my opinion, the correct conclusions about all the problems that people have: that, if they were a bit less self-interested and paid a bit more attention to their fellow men, things would be a lot happier and better. It’s like a little parable, I suppose.”
-Tom Georgeson was talking to Simon Walker
When We Are Married is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from 4 to 25 April and Liverpool Playhouse from 30 April to 23 May.
Profile: JB Priestley
Admittedly, JB Priestley never read Winnie the Pooh for an audiobook series and hasn’t had poems included in the GCSE English Literature Anthology, but his place among the literary elite of Yorkshire is inviolable. Here is a short summary of his life and work.
John Boynton Priestley (1894-1984) was born in Bradford. Having left school at 16, he went to work as a clerk for a local wool firm. Nonetheless, his column in the local Labour Party weekly, the Bradford Pioneer, hinted at literary flair. When the First World War erupted, he enlisted and was sent to the western front. This began a period of his life that disenchanted him so profoundly that he did not commit his memories of it to paper for almost fifty years.
A year after the War ended, Priestley matriculated at Cambridge, where he studied English and political science. Although his provincial accent and modest background embarrassed him, he retained enough self-confidence to embark on quite a prolific literary career after graduating.
His first two books, one a collection of anecdotes, epigrams and short stories and the other of biographical essays, were published in 1922, after which he moved to London with his first wife Pat and freelanced for journals including The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. The first of his several biographies, George Meredith, was published in 1926, the year in which he married Jane Lewis, subject of the best known of his numerous infidelities, following Pat’s death in November 1925.
The late 1920s and 1930s became one of the most productive periods of Priestley’s career. He wrote essays, literary criticism, biographies and fiction (including a gothic novel). The friendship that he forged with bestselling novelist Hugh Walpole in 1925 produced a joint novel, Farthing Hall (1929), whose advance Priestley used to fund what might now be labelled his “breakthough” novel – the highly successful The Good Companions (also 1929). English Journey, the renowned work of social commentary in which he travelled from the South to the North of England and recounted the deprivation that he saw, was published in 1933.
It was also during the 1930s that Priestley wrote 14 plays. The roaring successes Dangerous Corner (1932) and When We Are Married (1938) are probably the most familiar, although he went on to characterise the former as “merely an ingenious box of tricks”. He also visited America several times, where he befriended Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx.
The summer after the outbreak of war, Priestley began his own BBC radio show, ‘Postscripts’. Though well-received, the weekly miscellany was dropped in October following his remarks about the unemployment and poverty to which returning servicemen were subjected. Two years after the war he represented literature and the arts at the establishment of UNESCO, at the preparatory meeting for which he met Jacquetta Hawkes. Their protracted and scandalous affair led to both divorcing their partners to allow their marriage in 1953. As well as collaborating with Jacquetta on Journey Down a Rainbow (1955), he co-wrote the play A Severed Head with Iris Murdoch in 1963.
Priestley has normally been seen as a man of the Left. In addition to the concern for popular wellbeing displayed in English Journey and his tirade on ‘Postscripts’, he instigated the foundation of the CND through an article that he wrote for the New Statesman in 1957 and turned down a knighthood and two proposed peerages (although he accepted the Order of Merit in 1977). However, he could be less compassionate in his personal life – at one point he appeared to write that his many affairs caused him very few feelings of guilt.
For the most part, Priestley was a cheerful moaner – liberal of waistline, candid of tongue, attentive to his pipe and deeply fond of the Dales. No wonder Yorkshire is proud of him.
-Source: J Cook, Priestley, John Boynton (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
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