(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 11/3; Photo: Still on the case … Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls at the Playhouse theatre, London, in 2016. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian.)
His parable of collective social responsibility is a hardy classic but the Yorkshire playwright’s wider legacy should not be neglected
How on earth does one sum up JB Priestley? He wrote 39 plays, 26 novels and a huge amount of nonfiction and was dismissed by Virginia Woolf, with characteristic snootiness, as “one of the tradesmen of letters”. But, in art as in life, tradespeople are invaluable and with one of Priestley’s most popular plays, When We Are Married, about to be revived at London’s Donmar Warehouse, it is worth asking what the qualities are that make him a durable dramatist.
It makes sense to start with An Inspector Calls, which was famously revived by Stephen Daldry in 1992 in a production that has lasted for more than 30 years. What Daldry and his designer, Ian MacNeil, did was to cut through the play’s schematic outline and treat it as an expressionist fable about a family poised on the edge of self-destruction.
But I am convinced that the reason for the play’s survival lies in the pertinence of the Inspector’s final warning: “We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.” Whether in 1946 under a hard-pressed Labour government, in the post-Thatcherite world of 1992 or in today’s brutally polarised society, that message carries a timeless resonance.
Rereading many of Priestley’s plays, I am struck by the endless reiteration of the plea for social justice, allied to a romantic mysticism. The year 1937 saw the simultaneous production of two of Priestley’s plays about time: Time and the Conways based on JW Dunne’s ideas about the co-existence of past, present and future, and I’ve Been Here Before, about Ouspensky’s notion of lives recurring in an endless spiral. But, while the time motif is fascinating, both plays are underpinned by Priestley’s humane socialism.
