Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 7 September 2012

FEW playwrights have ever worried at a theme as consistently as JM Barrie.

IT isn’t only in Peter Pan that the Kirriemuir-born writer lamented the swift passage of time and the tragic loss of childhood. It was a subject he came back to again and again. His 1908 play What Every Woman Knows, for example, is about a man who has attained high public office despite having the emotional intelligence of a child. And 1920’s Mary Rose concerns a woman who disappears for 21 years only to reappear unchanged while the rest of the world has moved on.

Jo Freer, Joseph Mann and Kate Quinnell in Dear Brutus

It means that even though Dear Brutus (1917) appears to be a response to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with a title borrowed from Julius Caesar), it is actually, once again, a wistful contemplation of those things that might have been if only we could make time stand still or live our lives again. Tellingly, it is at its best when pushing into Barrie’s favoured territory of missed opportunity as opposed to when it pulls back towards Shakespeare’s comedic instinct for a happy ending.

The idea Barrie latches onto in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about the confusion that ensues when two sets of lovers enter a forest and have their romantic desires upturned. At first, he gives the impression that we’re going to get a standard-issue Victorian drawing-room drama as a group of well-to-do society types gather in a country house on midsummer’s eve. Their host is an odd man called Lob, played with sprite-like eccentricity by Robin Harvey Edwards, a latter-day Puck of uncertain age. They have no idea why he’s invited them, but it may have something to do with the forest rumoured to appear in these parts on the longest night of the year.

Cue a second-act fantasy, and a gorgeous Aubrey Beardsley-inspired design by Adrian Rees, in which everything is turned on its head. Mistresses become wives, servants become masters and the dissolute become honourable. In particular, the previously childless Mr Dearth (Dougal Lee) turns into a doting father of a young girl (Emily Altneu). This fantasy daughter engages him in a teasing conversation about how he’ll cope with his feelings of jealousy and loss if ever she is married. It’s a sad speculation within a happy reverie – a girl who doesn’t exist talking about leaving her fictitious childhood behind – and it highlights the dramatic tension at the heart of Barrie’s work. Here, in this “might-have-been” landscape, the playwright is in his element – the sorrowful dramatist forever grasping at the ungraspable.

By contrast, the closing act reunion, in which the various couples emerge from the wood with a self-knowledge they were previously denied, is dramatically satisfying but not as interesting as Barrie at his most poignant. John Durnin’s handsome Pitlochry production, the last to open in the 2012 summer season, does the play considerable justice, however, playing to the company’s strengths with a large cast, a lavish design and an understanding of the playwright’s obsessions.

© Mark Fisher, 2012

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• Pitlochry Festival Theatre
• Mark Fisher