The voluminously prolific JB Priestley eased his foot off the pedal a little in the 1930s, producing just 14 full-length plays, five novels, three social-conscience tracts and 500-odd articles. If there's one thing that the West Yorkshire Playhouse's Priestley retrospective has proved, it's that anyone responsible for spinning such a prodigious amount of words is bound to spend a substantial amount of time contradicting themselves. Over the course of three plays - Johnson Over Jordan, Dangerous Corner and now this delicate parlour-piece, set in 1912 - we have been able to appreciate how Priestley's intellect was protean enough to fight on three fronts, forcing back the frontiers of restless innovation, homespun existentialism and drowsy old dullardry, all at the same time.
Eden End, named after the house in which the action is set, is a piece of drifting, Chekhovian mood-music, the mood being one of unrelieved Edwardian wistfulness. The old house marks the final tombstone in the graveyard of ambition, where various factions of the Kirby family have washed up to lament the cul-de-sac of their careers. The patriarchal Kirby is an overly comfortable north-country doctor, who took the regrettable option of settling down rather than setting the medical world alight. Among his three offspring, Wilfred is a puppyish chump who travelled to Africa and found he didn't fit in, Lilian a pious spinster who stayed at home to look after mother and simmer, and Stella the loose cannon who misfired, and now prodigally returns with her theatrical dreams in tatters.
How one longs for someone to put a jackboot through this pampered enclave of cultivated self-pity - exactly as Priestley did himself, in fact, in An Inspector Calls. Eden End is an example of his remarkable ability to wear the boot on the other foot. The play is introduced as having occupied the fondest place among the author's own creations, and finds him indulging the bourgeois complacency that he attacks elsewhere.
Samantha Robson's sparky performance as the prodigal actress Stella is enjoyable, though, as is Dale Rapley's bounderish energy as the cad of a husband whom she brings in tow. Ian Brown's lucid, sepia-tinted production demonstrates commendable fidelity to the play, but nothing can dispel the sense that the whole thing could be an elaborate spoof of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming in the style of a Merchant Ivory film.
Until November 24. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
