Play: Dangerous Corner

Overview
J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner (1932) is a taut drawing-room drama built around a single evening that exposes the fragility of polite certainties. Set among the partners of a small publishing firm and their intimates, it begins as a genial after-dinner gathering and becomes a forensic unpicking of a recent death in their circle. A casual remark turns the talk toward uncomfortable facts, and each truth pried loose drags another into the open. Priestley pairs the pleasures of a whodunit with a philosophical experiment about causality, chance, and the price of candor.

Setting and Characters
The action takes place in the comfortable home of Robert and Freda Caplan. Their guests include Gordon and Betty Whitehouse, Charles Stanton, and Olwen Peel, with the popular novelist Miss Mockridge present at the outset as an amused, slightly intrusive observer. Hovering over them is Martin Caplan, Robert’s brother, who recently died by gunshot in circumstances generally assumed to be suicide, clouded by rumors of embezzlement at the firm.

The Dangerous Corner
A light, even flippant, conversation is nudged onto a “dangerous corner” when a musical cigarette box prompts a question about who handled it on the night Martin died. The phrase becomes Priestley’s emblem for those conversational bends where propriety gives way to inquiry. Robert, who longs for clear answers, refuses to swerve. The group begins to re-examine the night of Martin’s death and the firm’s missing money, challenging received versions that have made social life bearable.

Revelations and Unraveling
Truths arrive in linked jolts. Pleasant surfaces, happy marriages, loyal friendships, honest business, prove to be veneers. Romantic entanglements emerge: mute devotion, unrequited desire, and clandestine attachments that tie multiple people to Martin more intimately than any of them had admitted. So do financial compromises: the embezzlement that was thought to damn Martin is reinterpreted as the act of another, concealed under a hush of professional loyalty and fear. Small evasions, the misremembered phone call, the unasked question, the misplaced document, are shown to be deliberate lies told to keep the peace.

Olwen Peel, the seemingly self-effacing colleague, holds the crucial piece. She was with Martin on the night he died and, in trying to force a reckoning, set off the chain of panic and impulse that ended with a shot. Whether Martin’s death was suicide, accident, or a moment’s blind reaction becomes almost secondary to the play’s insistence that every person in the room helped load the moment with their silence or deceit. Robert, who has pursued truth as a moral absolute, discovers that the facts destroy his marriage, his friendships, and his idealized image of his brother.

Reset and Resonance
After the devastating unmasking, Priestley performs a theatrical switch. Time seems to slip. The scene rewinds to the same after-dinner moment with the same guests and the same cigarette box, but the fateful remark is not made. The conversation veers safely away from the corner; the party remains cordial; Miss Mockridge departs with cheerful impressions to mine for fiction. Nothing has changed outwardly, because nothing was challenged.

The doubled ending reframes the entire evening as an experiment in cause and effect. One inquisitive turn produces confession, collapse, and perhaps a grim kind of integrity; the other preserves harmony by leaving truth buried. Dangerous Corner weighs the seductions of social ease against the corrosive, yet potentially clarifying, demands of honesty, inviting the audience to judge whether survival is better served by knowledge or by the tacit agreements that keep the talk light and the evening pleasant.