BBC R4 - J B Priestley's 'Time & The Conways'
Songs sung by Sharon Wilmott
Music by Malcolm McKee & Jenny Phillips
Adapted & directed by Sue Wilson 
Broadcast September 17, 1994 in the BBC's 'J B Priestley Season'
Coded from tape at 128/44.1

One of Priestley's time plays. This one looks back at twenty
years in the life of the Conway family - 1919 to 1939.

It seems to me that Priestley's obsession with time has its
roots in the same place as Kurt Vonnegut's. Dislocation from
witnessing events so extreme as to be near impossible to believe. 

I draw this comparison because, even though the WWI battles
went on for weeks and months, their huge body counts happened
in hours. Vonnegut went to bed in a packed ornate city. He
woke to a pile of ash. Priestley saw hundreds of his Bradford
boyhood contemporaries die in a couple of doomed attacks in
September, 1915. In 1917 he witnessed the first day of a Somme
Offensive that killed 60,000 allies before lunchtime.

Ever after, when Priestley thought about his youth, he saw
" ... a crowd of ghosts ...". No wonder it was 1962 before
he could write about the war.

Cast
Marcia Warren
Belinda Sinclair
Stella Gonny
John Detine
Toby Stevens
Amanda Redman
Emma Fielding
John McCargle
Julia Hills
Christopher Scott
Sharon Wilmott
Malcolm McKee
.