Reviews

Time & the Conways

| London's West End |

6 May 2009

Lightning rarely strikes twice, and an attempt by the National Theatre to replicate its 1992 success with Stephen Daldry’s sensational production of J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (still touring) comes badly unstuck in this over-stuffed revival of a lesser Priestley play, Time and the Conways, last seen with Joan Plowright and her daughters at the Old Vic nearly twenty years ago.

Director Rupert Goold and designer Laura Hopkins do their best with their dissection of a family and its fortunes between the two world wars, but the apparent “experimentalism” of the structure proves a mixed blessing, not a boon to creativity.

We start in 1919 on the night of Kay Conway’s 21st birthday party. The charades are interrupted by a second act fast forward to 1938, Kay’s fortieth, and a summary of how illusions have faded, bitterness grown and tragedy overtaken them all, before the first act party is resumed, with all the ironic add-ins of future hindsight.

The one character with any intimation of Time’s trickery and deceptions is Kay, an aspiring novelist who has dwindled into a hack journalist, interviewing celebrities for the Daily Courier. Hattie Morahan therefore elects to play Kay as if she was completely mad, striking weird poses at the end of the first act and melding into a multiple mirror image of herself (a rather strained video projection) at the end of the second.

This “Katie Mitchell” approach only serves to highlight the pat, predictable developments elsewhere in the play, with Adrian Scarborough’s craven little husband turning into a nasty piece of work and the socialist idealism of Fenella Woolgar’s nicely acidic Madge curdling into disappointment in the backwaters of the teaching profession.

You just know that the squeaky high spirits of the birthday party, played out against some hideously busy red wallpaper, will end in tears, and the second act wallpaper is therefore stark and dowdy dun-coloured, with talk now of selling off the family properties in a flat-building scheme, and the untimely death of the youngest sibling.

The unfailingly attractive Francesca Annis presides over the fall-out with the gracious, well-dressed good looks of a society hostess rather than a Northern matriarch; the slow, sure sob of Priestley’s humanity is missing, which is why Paul Ready as the self-effacing clerk who expects nothing and receives it in return, gives the truest performance of the night.

– Michael Coveney