The conception of Time

Time is the controlling factor of human life, and Time and the Conways is a play highly
influenced by theories of time. His author, J. B. Priestley, has long been fascinated by the riddle
of Time and the theories of J. W. Dunne. In his theory, Dunne states that in dreaming we
foretell future events about as often as we recall the past. He attempts to explain the
experience of precognition, that sense of déjà vu in which human beings, through the
distortion of dream, receive foreknowledge of future events displaced in time. He states that
time is not chronological and that there are several times coinciding. We, as observer number
one, perceive time one. However, there are other times and observers coexisting at that same
moment. His explanation is that in dreams, when we are no longer functioning as Observer
One, it is our Observer Two who catches a glimpse of events that await our Observer One in
Time One.

In his play, Priestley is encouraging the audience to look at the events as a landscape rather
than a fixed sequence of actions. He tries to explain that the Conways from Act I, when they
look forward to a bright future because the war ended, and the Conways from act II ,
devastated and miserable, are the same and are coexisting at the same time.

In Act I (1919), he shows the audience a family full of ambitions and expectations: Madge is
eager to be part of a new Socialist order; Robin expects to make his fortune in car sales; Hazel,
awaits her Prince Charming, Carol is bursting with an overflowing sense of life and Alan is the
most contented of all as he savors what seems to the others to be merely a humdrum
existence.

However, at the end of this Act, Kay is about to be granted a precognition or glimpse of the
future, all the way to 1937. As Priestley explained it, her Observer Two sees what will happen
to her Observer One. Nonetheless, what she sees is that none of the Conways have achieved
what they wanted. Kay is no celebrated novelist but merely a hack journalist, Madge is an
embittered schoolmistress, and Robin has frittered away much of the family funds and has
deserted his wife and children, Hazel is terrified of her wealthy mill owner husband and Carol,
the youngest of the Conways, has been dead for sixteen years.

In light of this, Kay feels devastated when she remembers her childhood, how happy and
hopeful they were and she blames time for everything, saying to his brother: “Every step we've
taken—every tick of the clock—making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use?
Better to die, like Carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it
before, Alan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it
Time.”

However, his brother has a different idea of time. He states that: “time is only a kind of
dream”. He thinks that the young Conways are “real and existing” but that Kay and himself are
“seeing another bit of the view- a bad bit, if you like- but the whole landscape’s still there”.
What Alan explains to Kay is Dunne’s theory, with the additional claim that in dreams, our
consciousness is able to experience the whole stretch of our existence, delivering precognitive
visions of the future.

In Act III, we return to 1919 and see how the over-confidence of the Conways, and Mrs.
Conway’s unwillingness to sell any holdings until the economy improves in the post-war boom,
flows into their demise in Act II. During this act, the audience wishes to warn the Conways, tell
them to make decisions that take into account past, present and future and not just their
immediate impulses and desires. The audience is squirming, while almost every character is
celebrating in blissful ignorance. The only character that shares the experience of the audience
is Kay. Priestley analyzes the conception the family has on time through the character of Alan:
“I believe half our trouble now is because we think Time’s ticking our lives away. That’s why we
snatch and grab and hurt each other.”

Just like the audience, Kay does not see her family the way she did in Act I because she knows
what future awaits them. When she finally breaks down at the end of the play, Alan says to her
that one day he will have something to tell her that may comfort her. However, the audience
knows that he has already told her something to comfort her in the future, in Act II. Alan said
that all human beings are at any moment only a cross- section of their real selves. At the end
of their lives, they are all of themselves in all of their times and may find themselves in yet
another time that is another kind of dream.

While the characters are trapped seeing just the immediate present, the audience can see the
whole stretch of their time, and they can spot all the pitfalls that these characters, will fall into,
snatching and grabbing and hurting each other.

The play is Priestley reflection of the idea of time. Priestley is trapped in the gloomy interwar
period, looking back at the failures of postwar promises, and he writes this play as he looks
through the peephole Alan mentions. Although Time and the Conways is predominantly grim
from the second act on, and the case of this family seems hopeless, we know that Alan was
right when he said Time doesn’t destroy, time is only a kind of dream, it is one of the views of a
whole landscape.

Belén Sancho
Kay: “ But the happy conways, who used to play charades here, they’ve gone, and gone
forever”

“KAY: But, Alan, we can’t be anything but what we are now.

“ALAN: No . . . it’s hard to explain . . . suddenly like this . . . there’s a book I’ll lend you—read it
in the train. But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we’re only a cross-section
of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when
we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us—the real you, the real
me.” (177)

The other part of Dunne’s theory—that even though we experience time “from one peephole
to the next” as Alan puts it, time itself is a “whole landscape” (177)
Plot
This play focuses on the Conways, a wealthy family living in a prosperous suburb of the
fictitious manufacturing town Newlingham, and their declining fortunes between 1919 and
1937. The first act takes place during Kay Conway’s twenty-first birthday in 1919. The boys of
the family have just returned from war. Mrs. Conway, the widowed mother of all of them,
owns lots of valuable real estate in Newlingham. The future appears to be bright.

The second act jumps ahead twenty years to the present when the play was written—1937.
Most of the Conways have scattered from Newlingham and fallen out of touch with one
another, but they are reconvening (coincidentally on Kay’s fortieth birthday) to discuss Mrs.
Conway’s finances, which have significantly deteriorated to the point of near bankruptcy.
Everyone is disillusioned with their lives, where they ended up, and this point is driven home
with Act III, which returns to that birthday party in 1919. We see the Conways interacting with
the family friends that will end up being their spouses, and expressing their desires for the
future—all of which, we know from the second act, will not come to pass.

The play begins in 1919 in the Conway home, in a prosperous suburb of a manufacturing town,
where a party is under way to celebrate Kay's twenty-first birthday. An aspiring novelist, Kay is
joined by her widowed mother, five brothers and sisters, friends, and neighbors. With the war
ended, all of them look forward to a bright future. Madge is eager to be part of a new Socialist
order; Robin, home from the Royal Air Force, expects to make his fortune in car sales; Hazel,
the family beauty, awaits her Prince Charming, while Carol, the youngest, is bursting with an
overflowing sense of life. Alan, a clerk in the Rate Office and the only member of the family
with no great hopes or plans, is the most contented of the lot as he savors what seems to the
others to be merely a humdrum existence.

Once their game of charades is over and the costumes are put away, everyone goes into the
next room to hear Mrs. Conway's rendering of Robert Schumann's "Der Nussbaum." Kay,
however, returns to the sitting room. She cannot let go of this moment of blissful happiness,
the happiest moment any of the young Conways will ever experience. Sitting on a window
seat, her head bathed in moonlight, Kay, with the special sensitivity of the artist, is about to be
granted a vision of her family's future as the curtain falls on the first act.

The action of act 2 seems to be continuous as the rising curtain reveals Kay in the same
position. When Alan enters and turns on the lights, however, it is obvious that several years
have passed. It is again Kay's birthday, but the year is 1937, the year in which the play was
written, and Kay is now forty.

: Mrs. Conway, has called her children together to discuss her financial difficulties but has
attempted to turn the homecoming into a party. Her children, however, are not in a party
mood this time. Kay, no celebrated novelist, merely a hack journalist, is involved in an unhappy
affair with a married man. Madge is an embittered schoolmistress, and Robin is unable to hold
on to a job. He has frittered away much of the family funds and has deserted his wife and
children. Hazel, too, has changed. Married to a wealthy mill owner who resents the family for
snubbing him years before when he had first come to town, she is terrified of her husband.
Conspicuously absent from the family group is Carol. On the threshold of life in the first act,
she has been dead for sixteen years in the second.  

the air is full of insult, accusation, and recrimination. Once the others have gone their separate
ways, a miserable Kay tells her brother Alan that life seems pointless to her now as she
remembers the happiness of their younger days.

At forty, she is constantly aware of every tick of the clock, of that great devil in the universe
called time. Alan, still the one stable element in the family, manages to soothe her. She is again
alone at the window as the act ends Act 3 continues the action of act 1.

Mrs. Conway can be heard singing as Kay is again discovered at the window. It is again 1919
and her twenty-first birthday. The events of act 2 have not yet taken place; life has not yet
exacted its toll.

Kay, however, has an awareness the others do not share. For her and for the audience, act 3
has a terrible poignancy as the carefree Conways unwittingly plant the seeds of their future
unhappiness and destroy one another in ignorance and innocence. The doomed Carol tells the
rest how full her life will be. She will act, paint, travel, but the point of it all, she explains with
Priestley's acquiescence, is to live. Moved, Kay begins to cry and asks Alan for comforting
words.

As the play ends, Alan replies that one day he will have something to tell her that may comfort
her What Kay needs to hear, what Alan will tell her in eighteen years, he has already told her
at the end of Kay's precognitive vision that is act 2-that all human beings are at any moment
only a cross- section of their real selves.

At the end of their lives, they are all of themselves in all of their times and may find themselves
in yet another time that is another kind of dream. If the ideas are Dunne's, Priestley transcends
theory in a profoundly moving play that affords insight into a person's plight in a bewildering
age and offers an audience something to cling to in the midst of the pain of life.
Pseudoscientific explanations are beside the point. The play is no bag of tricks, as some critics
have complained, with a third act where the second ought to be. Performed chronologically,
the three acts would not have the meaningful impact that