J.B. Priestley (review)

Reviewed by: J.B. Priestley Lincoln Konkle Maggie B. Gale. J.B. Priestley. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists Series. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. x + 207, illustrated. $110 (Hb), $29.95 (Pb). J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) was more successful commercially than critically and has largely been ignored by scholars. As Maggie Gale writes in her new book, “He continues to be perceived by some as a ‘lesser’ playwright of the mid-twentieth century, despite evidence to the contrary” (182). Perhaps that will begin to change with the publication of Gale’s fine study of his plays, which demonstrates that Priestley was “not only a socialist and a humanist, but also a playwright who experimented with the relationship between content and form” (181). In Part One, Gale historicizes Priestley as both playwright and producer in the London theatre industry. Though not taking a full-fledged new historicist approach, she provides an astute description of the economic and political matrix from which Priestley’s plays arose. One of the chief witnesses she summons is Priestley himself, since his direct commentary on the English class system and the theatre business “has a Marxist flavour in terms of its expressed understanding of the interrelationship between the economy, social power and cultural production” (22). Gale suggests that one factor in the critical underestimation of Priestley was the rise of New Criticism, which was anti-middlebrow (17). As Priestley himself thought, he was “too populist for the elite yet too impenetrable for ordinary folk” (19). Although they are often too brief, Gale is at her best in the analyses of individual plays in Part Two; these are divided thematically into chapters on “Family, Gender, and Sexual Relations,” “Time and the Time Plays,” and “Work and Visions of Dystopia/Utopia.” From a gender studies perspective, she writes that “Priestley simultaneously examines masculinity in a state of flux and patriarchy as no longer central to the family unit,” (80) especially in plays where the head of the patriarchal family is absent (e.g., Time and the Conways). Gale correctly observes that “gendered behavior as a social construct is an issue to which he returns on numerous occasions” (64), and her discussion of this subject suggests that much more work could be done in this regard. Of Priestley’s “time plays,” Gale points out that his use of déjàvu (e.g., I Have Been Here Before) alludes [End Page 620] not to eastern religious or philosophical belief in reincarnation but to recurrence. As Priestley explains, “Recurrence, as interpreted by Ouspensky, says we lead our own lives, with some differences, over and over again” (98). While Priestley did not necessarily believe in these ideas, he did believe in the perfectibility of man. As Gale notes, “Both an informal [i.e., implicit] and a formal [dramatized] embracing of utopias and utopianism are present” in his work (107). However, he did not think the solution was merely a matter of transposing the haves and have-nots. Priestley identified with the workers but believed that “an alternative to the masters/masses dichotomy was urgently needed, that a ‘better society’ would not come from simply changing the class of those in power, but that the power structures themselves needed to be changed” (108). In Part Three, “Key Plays/Productions,” Gale discusses The Good Companions, An Inspector Calls, and Johnson over Jordan. She claims that the tremendous success of The Good Companions as a novel, a play, and a film, television, and musical stage adaptation was a mixed blessing, as it established early in his career the populist image of Priestley that the literati so despised; “and to some extent the ‘myth’ of Priestley as merely a populist is still with us” (126). An Inspector Calls has become one of Priestley’s best-known plays, despite the cool reception, commercial and critical, of the original production, which was criticized for “proselytising left-wing politics to a theatre audience hungry for entertainment” (151). Gale agrees that “it is a political parable” (139) but also demonstrates Priestley’s skill in creating theatrical suspense that future audiences would find entertaining. Gale’s discussion of the film adaptation of An Inspector Calls is much...

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