Artistic Bios

John Boynton priestley

(1894-1984)

Priestley was born in the North England industrial town of Bradford. In his teens, he quit school to become a clerk in the wool trade. Already an ardent Socialist, he wrote articles for a political journal, The Bradford Pioneer, in his spare time. He left these jobs to enlist in the army at the outbreak of World War I. He was wounded at the front in France, recovered, and was then sent back to the front. After mustard gas poisoning rendered him unfit for further battle, he was made an arranger of troupe “entertainments,” giving him early experience as a theatrical producer.
After the war, Priestley established himself as an essayist and novelist. With the help of American playwright Edward Knoblock, he adapted his best-selling novel, The Good Companions, for the stage in 1931. Priestley, at age 37, suddenly found himself beginning a new career as a playwright. In 1932, he enthralled the West End with Dangerous Corner, an ingenious thriller that presents multiple outcomes of the same event. For the remainder of the decade, and throughout the 1940’s, Priestley would rule London theatre. His hits included Eden End (a 1934 comedy about a mediocre actress who discovers she can’t go home again) and An Inspector Calls (a 1947 mystery about a detective who uncovers the scandalous secrets of a middle-class Edwardian family).
By the 1950’s, however, Priestley was falling out of favor. His socialist politics ruffled the Establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. His apparently “realistic” plays, often set in the Edwardian past, seemed old-fashioned compared to the vituperative “Angry Young Man” movement then setting London theatre ablaze.
However, beneath the deceptively calm, ordered surface of Priestley’s drama lurks a subversive tumult of time and emotion. The iconoclastic Priestley was passionately against a class system of any kind. Several of his plays, such as The Glass Cage (1957) warn against the dangerous hatred bred by inequality. He was also intrigued by the vagaries of time. He studied the theories of mystic P.D. Ouspensky, who claimed there was an almost infinite number of time sequences, and mathematician J.W. Dunne, who argued that past, present, and future exist on the same temporal plane. Priestley’s own experiments with time are evident in such works as Time and the Conways (1937), a play that jumps abruptly back and through several eras.
Priestley’s work remained a staple of repertory theatre, but it wasn’t until the breathtaking mid-1990’s revival of An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry, that audiences began to realize how prescient he was.

Cast

Sandra Struthers-Clerc

Fiana Toibin

Jack Wetherall

Directed by: Lou Jacob

Set Design: Roger Hanna

Costume Design: Camille Assaf

Lighting Design: Marcus Doshi
Sound Design: Lindsay Jones

Properties Design: Deborah Gaouette
Production Stage Manager: Brian Maschka

Assistant Stage Manager: Andrea Jo Martin