The first production of James Barrie’s 1908 play ran for close on a year, no doubt delighting Edwardian audiences with its faintly subversive message that craftily comforted both sexes. Yes, behind every successful man is a clever woman; but no, men must still be seen to run the show. John Shand is a humourless young Scotsman on the make — the phrase originated here — who accepts a loan in exchange for a promise to wed the supposedly charmless Maggie, whose family sees her hopes of marriage otherwise slipping away. His gift for rhetoric helps him to become an MP and his party’s coming man, but it is Maggie who peppers his speeches with wit. Without her assistance his phrases are as heavy as old cold porridge.
What is attractive is Barrie’s skill in making this story work. A bare-faced coincidence brings two peripheral characters together, and the changes of heart by the two young leads is not sufficiently prepared; but the interlocking events that carry the plot forward are consistently enjoyable, as is a sense of the author’s puckish irony.
The first three scenes of Braham Murray’s pleasing production are prefaced by a skirl of the bagpipes but before the last we are given something French and mischievous because the country cottage is the realm of Gabrielle Drake’s worldly-wise Comtesse.
She is the only character savvy enough to guess Maggie’s secret, and until the closing moments of the play the only one who laughs. Barrie is clearly as fond of her as he is of Maggie — to whom, significantly, he gives his own mother’s name.
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Jenny Ogilvie gives Maggie the necessary air of good sense, and though supposed to be without charm she has a charisma that keeps one glancing back at her face to watch how she will reveal, yet conceal, her latest tactic for saving her man’s career. Mark Arends plays him as someone with such pompous certainty of his genius that his blindness to reality becomes endearing.
The play’s assumptions of a woman’s place belong to a vanished era, but Barrie’s spin on her predicament makes this a play that deserves its revival.
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