ABSTRACT
A number of critics have tried to frame Priestley’s playwriting into phases based either on chronology (pre-war, wartime and postwar) or on areas of thematic focus – time, socialism and the postwar world (Klein 1988: 245). It could be argued that such divisions are effectively irrelevant as Priestley returned to themes at different points in his playwriting career, and equally, aspects of socialist thinking have a sustained centrality in his work. One might see his playwriting as developing in line with his growing involvement in the processes of making theatre: the more he was involved in production and management the more aesthetic demands he made on the medium. The staging of plays from the early 1930s is far less complex than those from the late 1930s and early 1940s such as Johnson Over Jordan (see Chapter 8) and They Came to a City (1943) for example (see Chapter 5). However we choose to frame his plays, DeVitis and Kalson (1980) rightly point out that while Priestley became the ‘disillusioned optimist’ as he matured, he never lost sight of a Jungian emphasis on man’s goodness and the ‘concept of the oneness of all men’. This oneness places man as ‘a member of a charmed or magic circle’: at the centre of the circle is the family and as his career progresses Priestley widens the circle to embrace the ‘nation as family’ and the ‘world as family’ (DeVitis and Kalson 1980: 125). Such an analysis to some extent oversimplifies Priestley’s reading and appropriation of Jung, but it does provide an interesting framework which pinpoints the importance of the concept and actuality of the family as a social and socialising unit in his plays.
