UNTIL NOVEMBER 22, BATH: The writing of JB Priestley is as relevant to the 21st century as to the 19th in which he was born because he addresses universal themes.

His time plays, of which this is one An Inspector Calls is another have spine-tingling power. He expresses difficult truths with unnerving clarity.

In Time and the Conways he explores the concept that time is not a sequential movement of the present from the past into the future but rather a collection of parallel existences. We are all the experiences and events in our lives all at the same time but only aware of them separately.

Just one of the characters in this play truly understands and another catches glimpses, like little electric shocks, of the whole.

We meet the wealthy Conway family, widowed mother and six children, at two different stages in their lives. First just after the end of the First World War, it is Kay's 21st birthday and they are having a party, playing charades.

Brother Robin has just been demobbed and is confidently full of ambitions for the future. Alan the other boy in the family is a council clerk, dull, dependable and unambitious.

The four daughters are clever, pretty and also looking forward to exciting adventures in the future. The mood is optimistic and romance is in the air.

Fast forward to Kay's 40th birthday and the eve of another world war. The optimism gone, along with the family fortunes.

Bitterness has replaced some of the ambition and hope. Few of them have fulfilled their potential. It is a bleak scene. Rewind then, to the original party, a little further on in the evening and Priestley shows us the seeds of the future.

It is a work full of subtleties which are, only the whole, handled with care by this cast, headed by the inimitable Penelope Keith as Mrs Conway who, as she ages, maintains her defining characteristics of blindness to her beloved Robin's fecklessness and her loose grip on the economic facts of life. She also demonstrates breathtaking insensitivity to her children's emotions.

Jamie Chapman is the loveable Alan, who successfully contrives to be insignificant, yet comfortingly ever-present at the same time. Tam Williams is Robin, almost a pastiche of the spoilt son who takes it for granted someone else will always clean up his mess.

Sean McKenzie is powerful as a man of the go-getting breed which emerged from a bitter war determined to override the class system and grab their share of the nation's wealth.

Making her professional stage debut in this production is Naomi Benson who was not always comfortable as the studious Madge, bursting with socialist zeal at the beginning, but bitter when the new Jerusalem fails to materialise.

Time and the Conways by JB Priestley

Theatre Royal, Bath