Directed by Judith Howe
May 15, 16 & 17, 1997

Programme Notes       [ Photographs ]

This production marks the beginning of our 50th anniversary year. St. Lawrence Players was formed in 1947, with its first play, School For Scandal, performed in 1948. To reflect those dates, we are putting on a celebratory season between May 1997 and February 1998.

When We Are Married seemed an appropriate play with which to open the season, firstly because it concerns a anniversary and secondly because we have performed the play twice before in our fifty years. It was first performed in 1964 and then again in 1979. Two members of the cast this time, Dorothy and Malcolm Bentote, were in the 1979 production and one of our prompters, Beryl Orders, played Mrs Northrop in both 1964 and 1979.

I hope you enjoy this play and join us in October and February to complete our celebrations

Here's to the next fifty years!

Judith Howe

J. B. PRIESTLEY (1894 - 1984)
John Priestley was born in Bradford on September 13, 1894. He was not given a middle name by his parents but adopted Boynton later in life.

Tragedy struck the young Priestley very early in life when his mother died soon after giving birth to him. His father was a teacher working at Belle Vue Grammar School which John later attended. School life did not particularly suit him and he left at the age of 17 to work in the wool trade as a clerk for Helm & Co. He had, though, made up his mind to be a writer and spent much of his spare time writing. His first published piece, Secrets of a Ragtime King appeared in the London Opinion in 1913, and throughout the same year he regularly contributed to a local Labour Party weekly, the Bradford Pioneer, even though he was not a party member.

His comfortable life in the city was rudely interrupted by the outbreak of war and, in September 1914, he joined the 10th Duke of Wellington's. In France nearly two years later he was badly injured by a mortar bomb and had only been back at the front for a few months after recovering when the armistice was signed.

Within a year of the war ending Priestley married Pat Tempest, a neighbour from Bradford. He accepted a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read modern history and political science. In 1922, having completed his degree, he moved to London where he took up the life of a professional writer and began to mix in the same literary circles as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett.

Tragedy struck again when his father died of cancer followed, within a year, by his wife, leaving him with two young daughters to bring up. Good Companions was published in 1929, by which time he had remarried, and it was this book that made him a widely read and popular author. Further works, such as I Have Been Here Before and An Inspector Calls, confirmed him as a major literary talent.

He married for a third time and lived for many years near Stratford-upon-Avon and was given the Freedom of the City in 1973. He died on 14th August 1984 just short of his 90th birthday.

DMH