When We Are Married

When We Are Married is a three-act play by the English dramatist J. B. Priestley, described as "A Yorkshire Farcical Comedy". Written in 1934, it is set about thirty years earlier, and depicts the consequences when three middle-aged couples jointly celebrating their silver weddings are informed that they were not legally married.

By 1938 J. B. Priestley had established himself as a dramatist, becoming, according to The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, "one of the most highly regarded playwrights of his day". His earlier successes included The Good Companions (1931), Dangerous Corner (1932), Laburnum Grove (1933) and Time and the Conways (1937).

Priestley recalled the genesis of the play:

I was writing, very happily and at a furious speed, a farcical comedy that came finally to be called When We Are Married. My wife had given me the germ of the idea when we were crossing from America, for she had found in the ship’s library an oldish volume of French short stories, and one of these stories had amused her by describing how a couple who were celebrating the anniversary of their wedding suddenly discovered they had never been married at all. I had long wanted to write a funny play about the Yorkshire I had known as a boy, thirty years ago; so I took three couples instead of one, made it their silver wedding celebration, sketched in one or two scenes of genuine comedy ... and then, trying to remember every droll thing about that old Yorkshire, I let it rip.

While the play was in preparation the title was changed from the original Wedding Group to When We Are Married, quoting a popular song from The Belle of New York. Under the new title the play opened at the Opera House, Manchester on 19 September 1938, produced and directed by Basil Dean. (The Leeds Mercury, which liked the play, objected mildly that its first performance should surely have been in Yorkshire.)

After a short tour the production opened in the West End of London at the St Martin's Theatre on 11 October 1938. It transferred to the larger Prince's Theatre in March 1939 and ran until 24 June of that year.

Alderman Joseph Helliwell and his wife, Maria, are joined at their house in Clecklewyke in the West Riding of Yorkshire by Councillor Albert Parker and his wife, Annie, together with Herbert Soppitt and his wife, Clara. They are celebrating their silver weddings, all three couples having been married on the same day in the same nonconformist chapel in Lane End, Clecklewyke. Their characters quickly become clear: Helliwell and his wife are easy-going, but he is self-satisfied and inclined to infidelity; Parker is a narrow-minded and parsimonious bully and his wife is under his thumb; Soppitt, contrariwise, is bullied by his domineering wife.

The men are all prominent elders of Lane End chapel, and after the celebrations in the dining room, they gather in the sitting room, replete with port and cigars, to confront the chapel organist, Gerald Forbes, whom they intend to sack, because he has been seen walking out with young women, and, worse, is a southerner. Gerald turns the tables by revealing that on holiday he met a church minister, the Rev Francis Beech, who confided that thirty years ago, as a young minister at Lane End, he conducted four marriages – three of them on the same day – under the impression that he was qualified to do so, but, he later discovered, he lacked the requisite licence for it.