ABSTRACT
J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions, Jenny Villiers, Lost Empires, and Birmanpool celebrate theatrical performance in a range of forms while registering anxiety about its fate in the face of money-minded production systems and the rising dominance of film and television. His most provocative contribution to the genre may consist, however, in his foregrounding of a motif that hovers in the wings of many theatre-novels: theatre’s relation with labour. One of the genre’s peculiar features is its capacity to accentuate the work typically concealed behind proscenium arches, a world of scene-shifters, technicians, prompters, and dressers, not to mention actors’ own work in preparing for performances. While many preceding theatre-novelists reveal anxiety about theatrical art’s proximity to labour, distinctive about Priestley is his frequent attention to the ideological potentialities of this work. If, as Nicholas Ridout argues, something of theatre’s “communist potential” can be found in its capacity to trouble “fundamental assumptions about both work and time—about the work of time and the time of work,” Priestley’s sustained focus on time and work in theatre makes his theatre-fiction a provocative site for exploring this potential.
