When We Are Married

Alderman Joseph Helliwell and his wife have invited their friends the Parkers and the Soppitts to their sumptuous home in Clecklewyke. All three couples were married the same day twenty-five years earlier by the same parson, and their silver wedding celebrations are to be captured for posterity by the photographer of the Yorkshire Argus.

But these paragons of bourgeois respectability choke on their sherry when it’s discovered that due to an administrative mistake – they aren’t actually married!

Priestley throws a playful spanner into the works of Edwardian society, poking merciless fun at the social pretensions of provincial grandees in the England of 1908. The sitting-room doors of the Helliwell’s mansion form a perfect arena for farcical comings and goings as middle-class values are hilariously punctured.

by J.B. Priestley