On 11 September 1992, Stephen Daldry’s production of J. B. Priestley’sAn Inspector Callsopened at the National Theatre in London, nine years to the day before the obliteration of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre. With hindsight, the stunning, act-threecoup de théâtre, when the doll’s house on stilts that represented the Birling family’s home suddenly pitched forward and collapsed, was to acquire the status of prophecy. Writing a few days after the first night, Jeremy Kingston, in his review forThe Timesnewspaper (14.9.92), highlighted the production’s contemporary relevance. Two speeches, he wrote:

are central...

My focus in this chapter is primarily on four of Priestley’s ‘time plays’, each of which is structured either around the return of a character or a reversal to a previous point in the action. The present is inescapably linked to the past.Dangerous CornerandAn Inspector Callsskilfully manipulate the whodunnit format in order to shine a powerful beam of light on moments when choices are made that will have momentous consequences for the future.Time and the ConwaysandEden Endare meditations on the nature of loss, but they, too, likeDangerous CornerandAn Inspector...

InDangerous Corner, An Inspector CallsandTime and the Conways, Priestley manipulates theatrical time in order to offer his characters, and by extension his audience, the possibility of a new relationship with the past, and potentially therefore also with the future. This is particularly evident inAn Inspector Calls, where Inspector Goole’s warning of the dire consequences of a failure to accept communal responsibility for injustices is followed by the crucial twist of ‘time’s tail’. This moment of return offers the characters the opportunity, at least, to behave differently. WhileEden Endalso focuses on a new way of...

BothArcadiaandCopenhagenwere first performed at the National Theatre,Arcadiaon 13 April 1993 at the Lyttelton Theatre andCopenhagenon 28 May 1998 at the National’s studio venue, the Cottesloe. The two plays are also similar in other ways. They each deal with complex scientific and mathematical ideas and, like Priestley’sAn Inspector Calls, they utilise what is essentially a detective-story format. However, while this format is used inAn Inspector Callsto expose guilt and to highlight the consequences of choices that the characters have made, inArcadiaandCopenhagenit serves rather as a basis...

Michael Frayn’sCopenhagenwas only one of a number of new plays in 1998 in which stories of children played important roles. ‘Few theatregoers can have failed to notice the extraordinary preoccupation with children in this season’s crop of new plays’, Sam Marlowe remarked in his review of Mark Ravenhill’sHandbag(What’s On, 23.9.98), which opened at the Lyric Studio on 14 September 1998. His words echoed Michael Billington’s comments in theGuardianthe previous week: ‘Babies. They are everywhere this theatrical season. Test-tube babies. Phantom babies. Abducted babies. Even murdered babies’ (16.9.98). SubtitledThe Importance of Being Someone, Ravenhill’s...

In his review ofFar Awayfor theFinancial Times(4 December 2000), Alastair Macaulay described Caryl Churchill as ‘the most original playwright in Britain’. Churchill’s combination of technical experimentation and acute sensitivity to current social and political concerns has frequently been remarked upon. One innovative aspect of her work that has received little attention, however, is the radical use she makes of two traditional narrative forms that I have explored in earlier chapters, namely the fairy story and the whodunnit.The Skriker, Far AwayandA Number, all of which are discussed in this chapter, rely on the in-built...

The stories of murdered children in this chapter have a topical significance that links them with Rhona’s story in Chapter 5, though the contemporary relevance in this case is not to paedophilic killers but to the Iraq war and global terrorism. Anxiety about the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces informed a number of productions in 2004 and 2005. Among the new plays on the topic of Iraq, the most high profile was David Hare’sStuff Happens, which opened at the Olivier Theatre in September 2004. The most powerful dramatic anti-war voice, however, was a...

Approximately a quarter of the productions discussed in the preceding pages were staged at one of the National Theatre’s three venues, the most recent beingIphigenia at Aulis, directed by Katie Mitchell, which played at the Lyttelton Theatre from 22 June to 7 September 2004. The texts that are addressed in this and the final chapter all received productions at the National Theatre in 2005. In my Preface to the book, I wrote that lost children project the possibility of children who are found, and my focus in these two final chapters is primarily on rediscovery and survival. This chapter...

Virtually all the plays and novels I have discussed are strongly reliant on narrative. Sometimes the way in which the story is told can restructure time, as it does inDangerous CornerandAn Inspector Calls, where a moment is recreated in order to investigate both the events that led up to it and its likely future consequences. Tales about ghosts also bring the past into the present because time is no longer subject to linear progression. It can move backwards, or leap forwards, or apparently stop altogether. Some stories recreate the past in order for the characters to find...