By J. B. Priestley. Directed by Bill Dow. A Playhouse Theatre Company production. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Thursday, May 6. Continues until May 22

You can practically smell the mildew on the script’s pages. The thematic content of J. B. Priestley’s 1932 play Dangerous Corner remains relevant, and the performances in this production are uniformly strong, but the melodramatic conventions of his drawing-room drama are so antique that they’re laughable.

The story is all about revelations of betrayal. Publisher Robert Caplan and his wife, Freda, are entertaining guests, including novelist Miss Mockridge and two other partners in the publishing house: Freda’s brother Gordon and a man named Charles Stanton. Olwen Peel, who works for the firm, slinks around looking gorgeously guilty, and Gordon’s wife, Betty, busies herself acting like a bimbo and resenting others for regarding her as shallow.

Everybody has an earth-shattering secret, and I mean everybody. The play can’t go 15 minutes without somebody declaring a long-standing illicit devotion to some other member of the party, or confessing to robbery or murder. Handled with psychological depth, any one of these revelations would be worth a whole play. But Priestley is a plot junkie, and by contemporary standards the endless accumulation of shocks—“I was a fool not to know!”—looks ridiculous. The opening-night audience was rolling with laughter—merrily, it must be said—but it would be hard to argue that merriment was the sought-after response; director Bill Dow recently told a local daily paper that he’s sure that Priestley didn’t intend the play to be a comedy of manners.

Dow declared that he wanted to get at the “desperation of human life”, but the play makes it difficult to care deeply about these bourgeois figures and their sins. Because the characters reveal little about themselves until they spill their guilty beans, it’s hard to work up much retroactive sympathy.

That’s not to say that this play and production have no heft. The idea that we create fictions of loyalty and dependability in order to survive remains current—although it probably doesn’t sting as much as it did in 1932. Dow ends this mounting with by far the most exciting image of the evening. I won’t give away specifics, but I will say that it highlights audience complicity in the maintenance of illusions.

The ensemble of actors deserves full credit for maintaining focused, honest, and nuanced performances, despite the melodramatic script and giddy public. Jennifer Clement brings out all of Freda’s chilly sophistication and wracking sorrow. Tom Scholte is humbly and thoroughly present as Stanton. Recent Australian import Anna Galvin feels period-perfect as Olwen. And Vincent Gale is indignation itself as Robert.

Designer Alison Green has created some gorgeous dresses—especially Olwen’s apparently liquid sea-green silk number.

But the big question, as with the Playhouse’s last offering,The Love List, is: why choose this script?