Wednesday, 28 November 2001
What do we know of John Boynton Priestley? Apart, that is, from his extraordinarily productive life (he died aged 90 in 1984), during which he produced 50 plays and dramatic adaptations, countless novels, essays, articles, social histories and accounts of his travels. What lay beneath the poses (cosmopolitan patriot cussed Yorkshireman, cultured and engaging Philistine, reactionary Radical) that he so assiduously cultivated? In its recent focus on Priestley, the West Yorkshire Playhouse has encouraged a revival of interest in a dramatist often written-off as second-rate. And in his affectionate anthology of Priestley, with more than 30 extracts drawn from a dozen or so of his works (most of which are now out of print), this newspaper's chief theatre critic, Paul Taylor, has fleshed out his character and personality with, as Jung once said of Priestley, "a straight and an inverted eye".
The anthology is not presented chronologically or thematically, but rather in the way in which you begin to get to know a person, rubbing along with them so that their character traits and opinions start to gel into some sort of recognisable mould. In a semi-rehearsed reading, members of the cast of the playhouse's production of Priestley's Eden End took the parts of the narrator and of Priestley himself, along with various real people and imaginary characters.
George Bernard Shaw is here acknowledged as a genius but revealed also as someone with a "tricky element", clamped inside the persona he had built up, "as hard as a carapace". Priestley sums him up wittily as "speaking through a megaphone, tricky about sex, about dictators, about equality, about Russia, where he would not have lasted a month except as a distinguished visitor". Bloomsbury is here too, in Virginia Woolf's outrageous description of Priestley as one of the "tradesmen of letters". Whoever said that literary snobbery was a modern invention?
But despite the delight to be enjoyed in his sharply observed encounters with others, especially his family's whist-drive friends, it is glimpses of the writer himself that provide the real fascination. While the young Priestley was seduced from childhood by any form of entertainment, his schoolteacher father was suspicious of it, considering it "at best a waste of time and possibly a danger to sound character building". How surprised he would have been by the entertainment created by a son who was never encouraged to write anything – the West Riding where Priestley grew up had "a genius for discouragement as stony as its walls".
While no anthology of less than two hours could hope to do justice to a man of so many dimensions, Taylor has taken the opportunity to include something from the less accessible and more experimental aspects of the writer. A substantial chunk from Journey Down a Rainbow deals with the effects of Admass (Priestley's own word) on American society, while a duologue from his early play They Came to a City explores the vision of Utopia and its effect on society. Revealed by Taylor to be less of the crackpot (as he modestly described himself), and more the perceptive visionary, Priestley deserves our renewed attention.
©http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/jb-priestley-west-yorkshire-playhouse-leeds-618308.html