Like his most famous play, ‘An Inspector Calls’, JB Priestley’s ‘Eden End’ is set in 1912, a year the playwright clearly picked out as a culturally late moment for the British Empire.
Unlike the thunderous ‘Inspector…’, the restrained ‘Eden End’ flopped upon its 1932 premiere, its elegiac overtones and blackly ironic undercurrents sitting poorly with a nation grimly intent on keeping the imperial flag flying.
The paucity of revivals since might also be attributed to the play’s ponderous pace: a fruity vaudevillian interlude aside, Laurie Sansom’s production for English Touring Theatre does little to sex up Priestley’s stately text. The results are quiet, but powerful.
After running away eight years earlier, feisty Stella Kirby (Charlotte Emmerson, pictured) returns to Eden End, her family home, to discover little has changed. Yet for all their seeming contentment, her family teeters on the verge of obsolescence: sister Lilian (Daisy Douglas) scoffs at the suffragettes; brother Wilfred (Nick Hendrix) blindly anticipates a peaceful decade to come; their father, Doctor Kirby (William Chubb) is now old and frail; and dashing Geoffrey Farrant (Jonathan Firth) has wasted his youth on foolish romantic dreams of Stella.
Though inescapably slow-moving – the fact so little happens is the great tragedy – Sansom’s production is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and his ensemble rock-solid.
If it lacks ‘An Inspector Calls’s fire and blood, ‘Eden End’ offers something more poignant, a sighingly sad, wearily knowing portrait of the passing of Edwardian England.