Kenneth Hurren on not being beastly to Priestley
If you can't get a defence of J. B. Priestley's Eden End from me — libellously reputed as I am to languish in a bygone day — I don't know where you are going to find one. The dear old thing has been trundled out by the National Theatre at the Old Vic in honour of Priestley's octogenary, which occurs later this year and raises an immediate difficulty. Who wants to be thought of as the sort of ruffianly sore-head who goes around mugging old gentlemen of eighty by beating them about the head with their old scripts? It is somehow worse than being disrespectful to the dead, and I have noticed that my colleagues, or those able to restrain themselves from being embarrassingly patronising, have evaded the issue very cunningly: Priestley (they say in effect) deserved to be honoured by a better work than this arthritic potboiler. I should like very much to say something of the sort, and I would if I could be sure you wouldn't press me to be more specific. Alas, I can see that it is right on the tip of your tongue to ask which better work, and there, in a manner of speaking, you have me. (One of the reviewers suggested vaguely the plays in which he "spoke of his social ideals," a dramatic category in which Priestley once enjoyed an amusingly high reputation, but I fear I cringe at the thought of the Old Vic stage awash in that peculiarly wet nalvete.) So this is, in
fact, if somewhat obliquely, a defence of Eden End — if not exactly of the play itself, at least as the best choice the 'National' could have made, given their wish to pay tribute to the old fellow. It is as richly ornamented a specimen as you could find of the soggy ragbags of contrivance that passed for 'well-made plays' in the 'thirties — which are not entered in the annals of drama as one of the golden ages — and I cannot think of any of Priestley's works that better epitomises his strengths and weaknesses as a playwright.
Though written in 1934, the play is set in 1912, at first glance a wilful folly which must, the thought occurs, have made it seem strangely 'dated' even when new. Of course, the idea had a shrewder and dual purpose, firstly (not so pronounced here as in An Inspector Calls) to make tendentious social comments that were no longer valid at the time of writing, and secondly to achieve ironic effects by having the characters look forward to a world which the audience knows didn't turn out quite as anticipated. Nevertheless, at this additional remove, the 'datedness' is more apparent than the shrewdness, and the device ultimately as transparent as the manipulation of events to provide the plot — which has to do with the family of a Yorkshire country doctor and in design bears superficial resemblances to The Cherry Orchard, with which it might be compared, though only by the unkind.
The characters are the kind of stock figures that flourished in the second-rate drama of the period, but Priestley had that instinctive feel for the human detail that transforms them into something more than plastic people, or at least gives resourceful players something to work. on. Under Laurence Olivier's affectionate direction they are here fleshed out splendidly: Leslie Sands as the doctor is so dourly sensible that it is almost possible to overlook the in-built stupidity of the character, who is supposed to believe that his runaway daughter, Stella, has become a celebrated acress; Joan Plowright, perhaps just a bit too obviously mangled by life's disillusionments, plays this hapless stage failure, homecoming after eight years; Michael Jayston is her amiably alcoholic actor-husband, headed for a middle-age of diminishing employment opportunities in touring companies of dwindling consequence; Louie Ramsey is the
sacrificial stay-at-home sister who has not even been able to hook the prodigal daughter's discarded local suitor; Gabrielle Daye is the obligatory family retainer, nervously suspicious of such gadgets as the telephone; Paul Gregory is the girls' brother, on leave from West Africa and an example of conspicuously delayed adolescence that has generally disappeared from real-life and is only visible nowadays in plays of the 'thirties and perhaps Tramps; and Geoffrey Palmer is the tweedy, ridin' and shootin' chap from the manor (who slopes off to the Antipodes 'to forget' on learning of Stella's marriage), another character of a stripe that has rather gone out of fashion and whom Palmer really has no option but to caricature rather roguishly. .
The story still takes the attention, for Priestley was never less than an adroit spinner of yarns. What he could not resist, unhappily, was the temptation to clutter up the main stream of the narrative with tedious flotsam reminiscences. 1 could not really take serious issue with an uncharitable friend who, by the second interval, had already retitled the show, Eden Never-end.
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