Theatre review: Dear Brutus

J. M. Barrie’s Dear Brutus may take its title from Julius Caesar, but the Shakespeare play it borrows most overtly from is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lob (Robin Hooper) is a puckish – literally – old man who’s invited a group of strangers with one thing in common to spend the week at his home. As his guests try to figure out what their mysterious common characteristic is, they hear a local legend of a magical wood that appears in a different spot every Midsummer’s Eve; anyone who enters it is never seen again. The enchanted wood does appear, of course, and most of the guests do enter it, but in a three-act structure that’s like a much better-done version of The Passing of the Third Floor Back, they do all emerge again, all changed to varying degrees. This is a play full of wild variations in tone, as what each group of characters discovers in the wood is very different.

Theatre review: The Philanderer

Bernard Shaw's The Philanderer is set in and around a gentlemen's club with a difference: One that allows in both ladies and gentlemen, on the proviso that the women be approved as "un-womanly" and the men as "un-manly." It's Shaw's response to the scandalously independent women of Ibsen - the club is called The Ibsen Club - and sees its titular character use women's new wish for independence and equality to carry out his affairs without being expected to commit. Charteris (Rupert Young) is sort-of considering settling down with the widow Grace Tranfield (Helen Bradbury,) but first he needs to get rid of his other lover, Julia (Dorothea Myer-Bennett.) He tries to dump her, reminding her that she bought into a relationship where she could break it off at any time so the same applies to him. When that doesn't work, he tries to marry her off to another of her suitors instead.