Stage Play script.
This exploration of family unity, loyalty and dishonesty is structured through three acts to use time as a clever ingredient of viewing, and attempting to predict, the future.
It depicts a typical upper middle-class family of the era, showing the inherent snobbery, their patchy understanding of the world they occupy, and how time and experience can fracture the internal relationships of a family. None of the characters is a monster, and none is a saint. Their levels of selfishness, self-satisfaction, ignorance, superficial charm, ambition and blindness reflect those of the society in which they exist.
In many ways, this is a play of its time. So much that it says has become common knowledge in the intervening years, which demonstrates Priestley’s prescience and contemporary observation.
It’s not a play I enjoyed, but I was engaged by the characters, as well-drawn as is usual with this playwright. A somewhat depressing play for me.
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[Any review is a personal opinion. No reviewer can represent the view of anyone else. The best we can manage is an honest reaction to any given book.]
Stuart Aken 
Thanks for the introduction – I hadn’t heard of him before, but have now done a little reading. He had some interesting ideas about time; a bit of a mystical take on it, I think.
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That’s good, Lynette. I suspect J.B. Priestley is best known for his play, An Inspector Calls, and that’ll be the one on which his reputation stands. It’s a ‘better’ play than this one, and a more conventional approach, so more popular. This one is interesting for a treatment of the subject that, at the time, was relatively revolutionary.
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