by J. B. Priestley
Other characters :
Richard, their son ; Freda, their daughter ; George Noble ; Mr. Clay-ton ; a porter ; Albert Goop ; Tom ;
Morrison, a schoolmaster ; Don Quixote ; a barman; a doctor; various voices
Produced by Barbara Burnham
The play will be introduced by the author
This modern miracle play by the liveliest and most versatile of contemporary playwrights (as those who listened recently to When We are Married and listen again tonight will agree) was one of the big London successes of 1939, and Ralph Richardson 's performance of the dead Mr. Johnson was a theatrical tour de force. It would be difficult to estimate how much the success of the play owed to his remarkable performance.
This final act presents the third, but by no means the final, stage in the adventures after death of Johnson, the modern Everyman. It finds him, having passed the terrors of preliminary examination and the torments of a pleasurable hell, arrived in a temporary paradise where the final desires of his earthly life-his boyish love of books, his old friends, and his deepest love, return to him to re-enact the part they played in shaping his destiny, and also to prepare him for his further mysterious journeyings.