Play: Time and the Conways

Overview
J.B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways, first staged in 1937, blends family drama with a bold experiment in theatrical time. Set in a provincial Yorkshire home, it follows the prosperous Conway family across the liminal decades between the end of the First World War and the late 1930s, tracing the unraveling of youthful hopes and class certainties. Priestley uses a non-linear structure to expose the gap between promise and outcome, and to probe whether human lives are shaped by fate, character, or broader social change.

Structure and Setting
The play unfolds in three acts set in the same living room. Act I takes place in 1919 during the 21st birthday party of Kay Conway, alive with games, flirtations, and plans. Act II jumps forward to 1937, revealing the family worn down by disappointments. Act III returns to the night of the party, reframing earlier moments in light of what has been glimpsed. This time-slice design, informed by J. W. Dunne’s theory that all moments coexist, lets Priestley turn a domestic evening into a prism for a whole era.

Act I: Youth and Possibility
In the buoyant aftermath of war, the Conways, widowed Mrs. Conway and her children Kay, Hazel, Madge, Robin, Alan, and the youngest, Carol, sparkle with optimism. Kay is eager to write and travel; Hazel basks in admiration; Madge burns with socialist idealism; Robin revels in charm and bravado; Alan, gentle and observant, stands a little aside from the noise; Carol gleams with pure delight. Outsiders drift in, notably Ernest Beevers, an awkward, self-made striver whose social insecurity mixes with ambition. The family’s wealth, house, and status seem secure, and their future appears as a sequence of glittering options.

Act II: 1937 Reckoning
The same room looks shabby. The Conways’ fortune has waned, bad investments and the long grind of the interwar years eroding their position. Kay works as a journalist and feels stranded between youthful dreams and compromised realities. Hazel is trapped in a joyless marriage to Ernest, who has prospered and wields power with chilly satisfaction; the social outsider now dictates terms. Madge’s zeal has curdled into bitterness. Robin, feckless, has fled from responsibility, leaving his anxious wife Joan to cope. Carol, the brightest light, has died young. The family solicitor delivers harsh financial truth. Priestley lets the scene unfold not as melodrama but as the slow recognition that the future once imagined has already hardened into a disappointing present.

Act III: Return and the Idea of Time
Back in 1919, Kay experiences a jolt, an intuition of the future seen in Act II. The same party scenes now carry double meaning: a charming liaison hints at a later entanglement; a witty barb becomes a fault line; Hazel’s attention to Ernest feels fateful. Alan comforts Kay with a vision of time as a landscape through which consciousness moves. If all moments exist together, then the suffering glimpsed does not cancel the reality of joy; there are rooms of light as well as darkness in the house of life. The play closes not with a neat rescue from fate, but with a larger frame that allows courage amid inevitability.

Themes and Significance
Priestley fuses domestic realism with philosophical inquiry, asking how personal choices, class structures, and historical tides intersect. The rise of Ernest mirrors the decline of an old middle-class complacency; the Conways’ manners and mood cannot shield them from economic forces or their own blind spots. Hope and disappointment coexist, not as errors and corrections, but as simultaneous truths. By making time itself a character, the play invites compassion for human frailty and steadiness in the face of change.