A dapper figure gazes implacably on the fraught family conference at which the failings of the Conways – partly their own fault, partly the consequence of the troubled economic times – are given a painful airing in the presence of their solicitor (Alistair Petrie). Ernest Beevers reminds us in some ways of the questing, all-comprehending police officer seen in the National’s last great J.B. Priestley hit, An Inspector Calls. More tellingly, perhaps, as played by Adrian Scarborough (pictured) – looking short, tubby and round-faced – he bears more than a passing resemblance to the portrait of Priestley printed in the programme for Time and the Conways. That Peevers is a bluff, rough-speaking northerner, an outsider in the middle-class milieu he observes, makes a comparison even more tempting.

The snag is that Priestley was a socialist, whereas Peevers is a go-getting, grasping Tory. His tentative introduction into the Conways’ life in 1919 – irksome, if condescendingly amusing, for them; embarrassing for him – was seen in the first act of this fine, too-little-performed play. Now, nearly 20 years later, in Act II, we find him transformed into a well-heeled survivor amid the economic gloom. What’s more he is married to Hazel (Lydia Leonard), prettiest of Mrs Conway’s four daughters whose ambitions for a glamorous life of world travel – so fate-temptingly expressed two decades earlier – have been replaced by a life of terrorised domestic servitude to an abusive husband in the dreary manufacturing town of Newlingham.

No, the characters closest to holding the views of their creator are the aspiring novelist, destined to become pulp journalist, Kay (Hattie Morahan) and her left-wing Girton-educated schoolmistress sister Madge (Fenella Woolgar). Her dream of the world to come – “no more booms and slumps and panics and strikes” – earned the biggest laugh of the evening at Tuesday’s press night for this very recession-friendly play.

At its heart is an exploration of the theory of time as a continuum, which is expressed to Kay amid her gloom after the family fall-out by her dull, but in some ways remarkably acute, brother Alan (Paul Ready), a humble clerk. When she tells him that the young Conways, whom we saw gaily playing charades at her 21st birthday party all those years before, are gone for ever, he replies: “No, they’re real and existing, just as we, too, here now, are real and existing. We are seeing another bit of the view – a bad bit, if you like – but the whole landscape’s still there.”

Then the director Rupert Goold and designer Laura Hopkins supply us with a startling visual representation of this theory as a septet of Kays – her Seven Ages, one supposes – multiply across the stage, busy at their looking glasses in a balletic display. It’s an image as memorable in its way (and clearly intended to be so) as the famous disintegrating set of Stephen Daldry’s An Inspector Calls.

Quoting William Blake, Alan advises Kay, too, that “man was made for joy and woe”. That both ingredients are amply supplied in the play – a work almost Chekhovian in this sense – is an appealing feature of this well-managed revival. Nowhere better is the study of dark and light seen than in Priestley’s treatment of the widowed materfamilias (the admirable Francesca Annis), a woman of crass insensitivity and thrilling directness, but with redeeming love for her family, some members of it at least.

These include, pre-eminently and most unfortunately, her younger son Robin (Mark Dexter), a stereotypical hooray Henry, fresh from the RAF in Acts I and III, which returns us cleverly to 1919, transformed 20 years on into a pathetic failure and drunk. His fecklessness and extravagance are the chief cause of her ruin.

Lyttelton Theatre, until July 27. Tel. 0207 452 3000 (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk).