By Maggie B. Gale
J. B. Priestley is the 1st booklet to supply an in depth and recent research of the big contribution made by way of this playwright, novelist, journalist and critic to 20th century British theatre. Priestley was once usually criticised for being both too populist or too experimental and this learn unpicks the contradictions of a playwright and theatre theorist well liked by audiences yet too usually disregarded through critics; describing and analysing intimately not just his performs but in addition their particular historic and modern productions. utilizing a mixture of archive, evaluate and demanding fabrics, the booklet re-locates Priestley as a theatre theorist of substance in addition to a playwright who challenged theatre conventions and assumptions approximately viewers expectancies, at a time whilst theatre used to be thought of either conservative and missing in innovation.
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Extra resources for J.B. Priestley (Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists)
Sample text
He has never lived in a society in which money did not mean much but privilege meant a great deal. (Priestley 1940: 102–3) Using the example of a post-revolutionary Russia, he notes that producing a simplified social structure through wealth distribution has not created an ‘equal’ society; here the old class system has gone only to be replaced by another which is even more ‘iron bound’ (Priestley 1940). Priestley’s belief that the class system and the easy manner in which power had essentially remained in the hands of the few – despite the genuine upheaval of war – underpinned much of his writing and especially his plays.
Of a second-rate little piece, and then wonder why they are disappointed. . No production is worth seeing after it has been running, without a break, for a year. (Priestley 1947b: 21–2) Function: theatre and community Priestley maintained that theatre had the power to educate and to integrate and enliven a community, to help it to think through the social issues which affected it. Such idealistic expectations drove his theatre work. Statistics verify his experience of the impact of the profit-oriented long run system; while the period after 1918 to the mid-1930s saw a periodical increase in the number of new plays going into production, by the late 1940s and early 1950s a higher percentage were running for longer.
The television adaptation focuses on creating an authentic replication of Edwardian variety performer/ audience experience, as the background in which Richard Herncastle’s journey from innocence to ‘manhood’ takes place. Neither therefore makes any attempt to remain absolutely ‘true’ to the novel, but both take from it a preoccupation with a nostalgic theatrical space and the demystification of the processes of theatre in terms of community and the everyday. 3 The novel is set in the Birmanpool Repertory Theatre (a thinly disguised referent to Birmingham and Liverpool repertory theatres), with Miss Padbury as the business manager – another thinly disguised referent, this time to the philanthropic West Midland’s Quaker Cadbury family.