Thanks to the freakish success of the National Theatre’s 1992 production of An Inspector Calls – it’s still touring to this day – JB Priestley is largely destined to be remembered as a one-play playwright.
And to be fair, that’s still an amazing legacy. But away from the burningly intense social interrogation of Inspector Goole, Priestly has plenty to offer, including When We are Married, a somewhat dated but thoroughly delightful social comedy that stands out from the period pack by sheer weight of northernness.
Timothy Sheader’s twinkle-eyed revival finds a nice balance between updating the play and surrendering to its innate charms. His production begins with cynical charwoman Mrs Northrop (Janice Connolly) greeting us through the fourth wall as if we were a pantomime audience before launching into Gracie Fields’ 1938 banger ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’, a song that (as far as I can tell) has nothing to do with When We are Married beyond being released in the same year. Nonetheless, it clearly inspired Peter McKintosh’s delightful set, a dazzlingly yellow arts and crafts drawing room dominated by a preposterously huge potted plant. And on the more modern side, Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ plays out at what is possibly the single funniest point in the entire play for Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ to play out.
Notoriously bluff Yorkshireman Priestley didn’t go in much for either subtext or subplots, and part of the joy of When We are Married is that it’s basically based on one amusing idea that Priestley pursues entertainingly and without diversion.
Set in 1908, it concerns three Yorkshire couples who consider themselves pillars of the local community. There’s considerable variation in the group: henpecked Herbert (Jim Howick) and whimsical Annie (Sophie Thompson) are basically nice people who’ve married unhappily, to Samantha Spiro’s angry domineering Clara and Marc Wootton’s tedious, conceited Albert respectively. In the middle are Joseph (John Hodgkinson) and Maria (Siobhan Finneran), whose house the play is set in, a little kingdom they loftily rule over. And today is a special day: the three couples married together 25 years ago and are now celebrating their joint silver wedding anniversary.
They have also summoned the church’s new organist Gerald (Reuben Joseph), the sole southern character. The young, single man has been seen out in the evenings with a woman – and the older men are not having it. He is given a pompous warning that he had best give up a social life in the name of respectability, and is then haughtily dismissed. He doesn’t go, though, but rather drops his bombshell: he has discovered that all three couples were ‘married’ by an inexperienced junior minister who didn’t correctly fill in the paperwork: ie, they are not in fact married at all.
Priestley didn’t go in much for either subtext or subplots
Cue, merry hell: not only is this revelation a bombshell to the couples, but the information rapidly escapes into the wild thanks to the cheerily DGAF Mrs Northrop, who listens to it all through the door.
The bigger picture is that the couples are smug and feel that their wealth – they have prospered from Bradford’s booming textile industry – makes them better than their fellow man. It’s clearly a period drama (it was when Priestley wrote it, 30 years after the year it was set), but the basic idea of insufferable rich people lording it over the rest of us and how thrilling it would be to see them get taken down a peg or two remains timeless.
The smaller picture is more complicated: the rich are all still human beings, and marriage in 1908 meant different things to now, especially for women who had few opportunities outside of it. Abruptly being granted marital freedom is mind blowing to a group of people who’d accepted this was their lot until death.: Suddenly Clara’s nastiness and Albert’s being a massive douche becomes a vulnerability, not a sign of their strength within the relationship.
Priestley wasn’t Brecht. But he wasn’t Coward or Rattigan or Wilde either, and one thing that really gives the relatively frothy When We are Married an edge is the fact the playwright doesn’t simp for the rich a la most of his peers. Self-regarding wealthy people are still a thing – hence, it can only date so much.
Okay, Priestley ultimately pulls his punches: rather than being a clarion call to tear down the institution of marriage he fudges it into an ‘everybody learns, everybody grows’ type outcome. But it remains funny, fat free and at least mildly insurrectionary. Plus Sheader’s witty, accessible production has a cast to die for: Thompson alone is a woman quite capable of bringing a house down, and her fluting voiced, slightly ethereal Annie is a hoot. But everyone is good fun, from Hodgkinson’s towering, increasingly flustered straight man Joseph to the great Rob Cook’s glorious supporting role as an increasingly smashed local press photographer. The fruity array of Yorkshire accents is a delight too – a bigger cynic than me might raise an eyebrow at the fact that there’s a fair few southern actors adopting what might be described as ‘comedy northern accents’ here. But they're good at it. And even the virtual absence of RP from this sort of social comedy feels gently subversive. The play is set in September, but it feels like a real Christmas gift.
