Theatre review: The Roundabout

Continuing my current theatrical theme of obscurities from big names, J.B. Priestley's third play The Roundabout is largely forgotten, but anything by the author of An Inspector Calls is usually worth taking a bet on. Actually, if the publicity had reminded me at the time I booked, as it does now, that Priestley was also the author of When We Are Married I might not have bothered, and we're very much in the realm of the latter play here, in a dusty comedy of manners. Fifteen years before An Inspector Calls, class inequalities are already a subject Priestley looks into, but Communism is more of a punchline than a matter for discussion here. Lord Kettlewell's (Brian Protheroe) finances are in freefall, but it hasn't stopped him from sticking to his usual routine of having guests - both invited and uninvited - at his country pile for the weekend. Among them is his mistress Hilda (Carol Starks,) as he's been separated from his wife for the last decade.

Theatre review: Summer Day's Dream

We open on a rustic scene, two old men who look like they work with their hands dozing in a farmhouse. What looks like a Victorian rural setup isn't the past though but the future - or at least the future from the perspective of 1949, when Summer Day's Dream premiered. J.B. Priestley's play takes place in the post-apocalyptic England of 1975, Britain having been worst affected by the Third World War, which ended with an atomic bomb sending the island back to pre-industrial times. A couple of decades on and the country has found a new life as an agricultural society with a mostly barter-based economy. In the old order Stephen Dawlish (Kevin Colson) was a wealthy factory-owner, but now the 80-year-old's country mansion is a farmhouse, and he and his family happily work the land, exchange goods for what they need, and entertain themselves in the evening with music, poetry and amateur dramatics.

Theatre review: Laburnum Grove

After scoring a hit with Cornelius last year, the Finborough delves into J.B. Priestley's less-performed work again, although 1933's Laburnum Grove only gets the alternate treatment, running Sundays to Tuesdays. Suburbia had really started to come into existence between the wars, and despite the state of the economy some middle-class families were doing quite well for themselves and settling into comfortable neighbourhoods. One such family are the Radferns, led by the solid, dull George (Robert Goodale) and brisk Dorothy (Karen Askoe.) George always seems to have cash to spare, so Dorothy's sister Lucy and her husband Bernard (Lynette Edwards and Timothy Speyer) are frequent visitors. On one Sunday evening, Bernard asks for yet another loan, on the same night that George's daughter Elsie (Georgia Maguire) brings a young man home.

Theatre review: Cornelius

Whenever the Finborough Theatre digs up a play that's languished in obscurity for decades and turns out to be surprisingly good, the natural reaction is to wonder how the work could have remained "lost" for so long. And perhaps the secret of their success is timing: Maybe if this play had been unearthed and staged a few years ago it would have failed to capture anyone's interest. But as with The American Clock, which came to the same theatre earlier this year, J.B. Priestley's Cornelius deals with an earlier economic crisis, and so has unfortunately taken on a relevance to the current one. Written in 1935, it follows the last few weeks in business of a small London company that's dealt in aluminium imports with some success for many decades, but now has the creditors knocking at the door.