Three couples celebrating their silver wedding are flabbergasted to discover that, through some clerical error, they have never been married and have been living in sin all these years.
When We Are Married is one of J.B. Priestley’s best loved plays and together with An Inspector Calls and Time and the Conways is among those plays in the 20th century most likely to last.
The broad farcical comedy, set in 1908, offers a robust mixture of Yorkshire realism and Punch-like caricatures. It has been regularly revived by professionals and amateurs ever since its premiere in 1938.
The play satirises the hypocrisy of the so-called respectable bourgeoise and their pretensions and one of the most enjoyable scenes is when one man (Marc Wootton) having just told his wife (Sophie Thompson), in the most patronising manner possible, that he is willing to marry her, is turned down.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asks. “Well,” she replies and pauses, getting a big laugh, Thompson’s timing being so perfect. She then goes on to list all his faults: pompous, selfish, conceited, stingy, dull, dreary.
Tim Sheader directs a fine ensemble which includes Jim Howick as a hen pecked husband who stands up to his termagant wife (Samantha Spiro) and John Hodgkinson as a man who finds he and his wife (Siobhan Finneran) have a totally different reaction to the scandal.
There are comic turns by Janice Connolly as a servant, who tells her superiors exactly what she thinks of them, and by Ron Cook as a drunken photographer from the local newspaper, a role once acted by Priestley himself.
The comedy gives a lot of pleasure in its old-fashioned way. Only the happy ending rings false. The glib homely moral about making the best of marriage in the circumstances presented doesn’t ring true and feels tacked on.
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