John Boynton Priestley

(1894-1984)

Priestley was born in the North England industrial town of Bradford. In his teens, he quit school to become a clerk in the wool trade. Already an ardent Socialist, he wrote articles for a political journal, The Bradford Pioneer, in his spare time. He left these jobs to enlist in the army at the outbreak of World War I. He was wounded at the front in France, recovered, and was then sent back to the front. After mustard gas poisoning rendered him unfit for further battle, he was made an arranger of troupe “entertainments,” giving him early experience as a theatrical producer.

After the war, Priestley established himself as an essayist and novelist. With the help of American playwright Edward Knoblock, he adapted his best-selling novel, The Good Companions, for the stage in 1931. Priestley, at age 37, suddenly found himself beginning a new career as a playwright. In 1932, he enthralled the West End with Dangerous Corner, an ingenious thriller that presents multiple outcomes of the same event. For the remainder of the decade, and throughout the 1940’s, Priestley would rule London theatre. His hits included Eden End (a 1934 comedy about a mediocre actress who discovers she can’t go home again) and An Inspector Calls (a 1947 mystery about a detective who uncovers the scandalous secrets of a middle-class Edwardian family).

By the 1950’s, however, Priestley was falling out of favor. His socialist politics ruffled the Establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. His apparently “realistic” plays, often set in the Edwardian past, seemed old-fashioned compared to the vituperative “Angry Young Man” movement then setting London theatre ablaze.

However, beneath the deceptively calm, ordered surface of Priestley’s drama lurks a subversive tumult of time and emotion. The iconoclastic Priestley was passionately against a class system of any kind. Several of his plays, such as The Glass Cage (1957) warn against the dangerous hatred bred by inequality. He was also intrigued by the vagaries of time. He studied the theories of mystic P.D. Ouspensky, who claimed there was an almost infinite number of time sequences, and mathematician J.W. Dunne, who argued that past, present, and future exist on the same temporal plane. Priestley’s own experiments with time are evident in such works as Time and the Conways (1937), a play that jumps abruptly back and through several eras.

Priestley’s work remained a staple of repertory theatre, but it wasn’t until the breathtaking mid-1990’s revival of An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry, that audiences began to realize how prescient he was.

J.B. Priestley keeps being rediscovered,” writes the London Times, because “he’s never really gone away.”

In the mid-1990s, New York audiences thrilled to Priestley’s prescient modernity in An Inspector Calls on Broadway and Dangerous Corner (adapted by David Mamet) for the Atlantic Theater. Now Mint Theater Company presents the American premiere of his 1957 masterwork, The Glass Cage.

Priestley’s drama of “fears, prejudices, hypocrisies and lies1” was first brought to light in 2001 when his son Tom recommended it for a reading as part of a Priestley Festival. A full production followed in 2007 at the Royal Theatre, Northampton—the first in fifty years—where it was hailed as a “not-to-be-missed revival.2” “This is what real theatre is all about,” declared The Stage. “Not all theatrical rarities are worth unearthing,” wrote Paul Taylor in The Independent, “This one resoundingly is.”

The Glass Cage is a taut drama depicting the danger of letting old family wounds go unattended. “The McBanes are a pious, Bible-thumping lot, dominated by the bullying David and his bachelor brother, Malcolm. Into their midst comes a strange trio of siblings, the fruits of a marriage between a third, wild McBane brother and a Native American woman. As the three disrupt the puritanical household with their boozing and sexual seduction, we are kept in the dark as to their ultimate purpose. Finally, Priestley makes it clear that they are hell-bent on revenge for the way their late dad was cheated of his rightful inheritance.3”

Priestley dispenses with his usual English setting in favor of Toronto, 1906. “You don’t expect to find a Priestley play located in Toronto,” observes The Independent, “but while it may be a far cry from England geographically, in terms of theme The Glass Cage has certain strong affinities with An Inspector Calls. But instead of a police inspector...that springs family skeletons from cupboards, the catalytic characters are connected by more than ties of blood to the well-heeled Edwardian hypocrites they are determined to rumble.”

Priestley slowly ratchets up the tension in his suspenseful tale before surprising us with his true purpose. “Just as it seems that this play is going firmly in one direction,” the Oxford Times writes admiringly, “the old stage magician Priestley swiftly conjures it somewhere quite different.” “It’s hard to believe one would think of Pinter when watching J B Priestley,” observes The Telegraph, “but The Glass Cage—unseen for 50 years—carries much of the calculated menace that the former was beginning to unleash on the London stage.”

Priestley wrote the play after meeting a trio of renowned Canadian actors, the brothers Donald and Murray Davis, and their sister, Barbara Chilcott. Priestley admired their strong family resemblance and dark, brooding good looks. “What an entrance these three could make!” he thought, and proceeded to write this play. The Glass Cage played to sold-out houses at Toronto’s Crest Theatre in 1957. Success secured a transfer to London’s Piccadilly Theatre, where the British public greeted opening night with seven curtain calls. The production then toured Oxford and Cambridge before being filmed for Grenada Television’s prestigious Play of the Week series.

1 BBC, 11/7/2007
2 The Oxford Times, 11/8/2007
3 The Guardian, 11/9/2007

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