The English author J. B. Priestley wrote a number of dramas during the 1930s and 40s, which have come to be known as his Time Plays. They are so called because each constructs its plot around a particular concept of

time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

. In the plays, various theories of time become a central theatrical device of the play, the characters' lives being affected by how they react to the unusual temporal landscape they encounter. The Time Plays comprise: *''

Dangerous Corner ''Dangerous Corner'' is a 1932 British play by the English writer J. B. Priestley, the first of his " Time Plays". It was premiered in May 1932 by Tyrone Guthrie at the Lyric Theatre, London, and filmed in 1934 by Phil Rosen. Priestley had rec ...

'' (1932), in which exposure of a group of characters' dark secrets is wiped out when the play returns to the beginning at the fall of the curtain; *''

Time and the Conways ''Time and the Conways'' is a British play written by J. B. Priestley in 1937 illustrating J. W. Dunne's Theory of Time through the experience of a moneyed Yorkshire family, the Conways, over a period of nineteen years from 1919 to 1937. It ...

'' (1937), which explores

J. W. Dunne John William Dunne (2 December 1875 – 24 August 1949) was a British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher. As a young man he fought in the Second Boer War, before becoming a pioneering aeroplane designer in the early years of the 20t ...

's theory of simultaneous time expounded in the book ''

An Experiment with Time ''An Experiment with Time'' is a book by the British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher J. W. Dunne (1875–1949) about his precognitive dreams and a theory of time which he later called "Serialism". First published in March 1927 ...

''; *''

I Have Been Here Before ''I Have Been Here Before'' is a play by J. B. Priestley, first produced by Lewis Casson at the Royalty Theatre, London, on 22 September 1937. The play is one of Priestley's J. B. Priestley's Time Plays, ''Time Plays'', and in 1947 the script w ...

'', which is inspired by P. D. Ouspensky's theory of eternal recurrence from '' A New Model of the Universe''; *'' Johnson Over Jordan'', in which a man encounters a series of trials in the afterlife;Priestley (1964) p134 *'' Music at Night'', given a dreamlike setting outside of passing time (as in dreams). *''

The Long Mirror ''The'' is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the ...

'', in which a woman artist has a curiously intimate relationship with a musician she has never met but has shared his life for five years in the spirit finally meet at a Welsh hotel; *''

An Inspector Calls ''An Inspector Calls'' is a modern morality play and drawing room play written by English dramatist J. B. Priestley, first performed in the Soviet Union in 1945 and at the New Theatre in London the following year. It is one of Priestley's ...

'' (USSR 1945, UK 1946), the most famous of them, where a family undergoes a police investigation into a suicide in which they are revealed to be progressively more entangled. Of all the theories of time employed in the plays, Priestley professed to take only one seriously: that of

as expounded in his book ''

''. However, his acceptance of the theory is qualified. Dunne's theory involved an infinite regress of time dimensions and levels of the self and Priestley rejected more than the first few time dimensions, which were sufficient to explain both the passage of time and precognition.J. B. Priestley; ''Man and Time'' (1964)

References

External links

The J. B. Priestley Society
Plays by J. B. Priestley {{1940s-play-stub