When Meredith Potter, the producer, asks Stella, the heroine of An Awfully Big Adventure, what she thinks J.B. Priestley's Dangerous Corner is about, she says: 'Love. People loving people who love somebody else.' He explains that she is mistaken, and that it is mostly about time. An Awfully Big Adventure is about people - members of the Liverpool Repertory Company in 1950 - loving people who love somebody else, as well as about Liverpool, about 1950, and about theatricals. What is to happen, and what has happened, are revealed in ways which only very retentive readers will twig; a second reading is even more satisfactory than the first. It deepens one's respect for the drawing of Stella - a human catalyst who wills nothing evil, but whose character and history have shaped her to cause trouble. Through her, the psychology and mechanics of mischief, of why accidents are likely to happen, are wonderfully displayed.

LRB 25 January 1990 | PDF Download