"Dear Brutus". Abingdon Unicorn

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website.

J.M. Barrie’s enduring idea of the ‘little boy who never grew up’ is an appealing fantasy of eternal innocence.

But the truth is darker than that.

James Barrie’s older brother David perished in an ice-skating accident when J.M. was only six years old. He grew up trying to keep his brother’s memory alive, going so far as dressing in his clothes and impersonating him, to try and comfort their grieving mother. His traumatised efforts to change the past trickled into his writings, which are full of characters miraculously getting a chance to have their time again. The ‘Lost Boys’ of Peter Pan are all cot-death victims who are magically restored to life. In his greatest play, The Admirable Crichton, a butler becomes the leader of his employers when they are cast away on a desert island. And in Dear Brutus a group of middle-class English country-house guests wander into an enchanted forest that shows them how their lives might have been if they’d had a second chance.

It's poignant to see the Studio Theatre Club mounting a J.M. Barrie play. Michael Llewelyn Davies, one of the original ‘Lost Boys’ who inspired Peter Pan, drowned not three miles from the Abingdon Unicorn Theatre.

Dear Brutus was a hit when it came out in 1917, and it’s easy to see why the idea of turning back time and making different choices might appeal to audiences ravaged by three years of war. But the play itself is a hesitant affair, stumbling through its conceits like its characters stumbling through the forest. Jack Purdie, a philanderer in the ‘real’ world, turns out be a philanderer in the magic wood too. Matey the Butler, who pilfers guests’ valuables in normal life, is an equally dishonest banker in fantasy land. Will Dearth, an alcoholic, failed painter, is, unimaginatively, just a non-alcoholic painter in the forest. When they return to the Edwardian living room of real life at the end it’s hard to see quite what they’ve learned from the experience. Compared with, say, the shattering soul-baring induced by the visit of the supernatural Inspector in An Inspector Calls, their adventure creates hardly a ripple of regret. The one major difference between the land of second chances and reality is the presence, in the forest, of the painter Dearth’s daughter, Margaret. She does not appear in ‘real’ life, and it’s never explained why she was present in the forest. The conclusion I draw is that she is another ‘lost boy’, a child who died: J.M. Barrie invoking his brother’s spirit yet again. That would be touching, but the scene between Margaret and her father is by far the longest in the play, and seriously outstays its welcome.

There are also hints of Bacchanalia in the forest. The elderly gentleman, Peter Coade, dances through the trees with a pan-pipe. But again, the idea is undeveloped, and stops short of causing any real impact. It’s a pity. The idea of some sort of drawing-room-based, primitive monster-god takeover is dangled before our hungry eyes, like Oscar Wilde meeting H.P. Lovecraft, and then whipped away, leaving only mild perturbation.

Even the title feels like a missed opportunity. Dear Brutus refers to Cassius’s line in Julius Caesar: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves’. It ties the play to human failings rather than supernatural solicitings. But the real Shakespearean antecedents of Dear Brutus are As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both referred to extensively in the play, and both visions of forests changing the lives of their characters.

The actors of STC grapple gamely with the limitations of the material, but I’m afraid it’s a losing battle. The magic of the play is elusive at best, and this production doesn’t capture it. Instead it is characterised by a pervasive quietness. The performers feel cabined, cribbed and confined. Even the music is strangely subdued. It feels like a production that is nervous of offending anybody. That may well be a reflection of the weaknesses in Barrie’s source material, but it means that this is a play that needs to be turned up to eleven in order to succeed, not muted. Everybody is much too polite to everybody else, which makes little sense when other characters respond as if they’ve been pushed beyond endurance.

From a directorial perspective, I felt this play was approached like an Agatha Christie Mousetrap with added weirdness, when it could have done with a bit more Jez Butterworth Jerusalem.

Having said that, it did contain the line ‘The svelteness of you! Why are you so svelte?’ which I plan to use myself at the earliest opportunity.