Dear Brutus

J.M. Barrie

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786824059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre britannique

1917. In a remote English village there are rumours of an enchanted wood. One of the inhabitants – a mysterious old man – invites eight strangers to stay. They all have something in common. When, one evening, the wood miraculously appears the guests feel compelled to enter. What happens there has the power to change their lives forever… Darkly comic, and presented in a sumptuous production for the play's centenary year, Dear Brutus is J. M. Barrie at his most magical.

Act One

The scene is a darkened room, which the curtain reveals so stealthily that if there was a mouse on the stage it is there still. Our object is to catch our two chief characters unawares; they are DARKNESS and LIGHT.

The room is so obscure as to be invisible, but at the back of the obscurity are French windows, through which is seen LOB’s garden bathed in moonshine. The DARKNESS and LIGHT, which this room and garden represent, are very still, but we should feel that it is only the pause in which old enemies regard each other before they come to the grip. The moonshine stealing about among the flowers, to give them their last instructions, has left a smile upon them, but it is a smile with a menace in it for the dwellers in darkness. What we expect to see next is the moonshine slowly pushing the windows open, so that it may whisper to a confederate in the house, whose name is LOB. But though we may be sure that this was about to happen it does not happen; a stir among the dwellers in darkness prevents it.

These unsuspecting ones are in the dining room, and as a communicating door opens we hear them at play. Several tenebrious shades appear in the lighted doorway and hesitate on the two steps that lead down into the unlit room. The fanciful among us may conceive a rustle at the same moment among the flowers. The engagement has begun, though not in the way we had intended.

VOICES:–

‘Go on, Coady: lead the way.’

‘Oh dear, I don’t see why I should go first.’

‘The nicest always goes first.’

‘It is a strange house if I am the nicest.’

‘It is a strange house.’

‘Don’t close the door; I can’t see where the switch is.’

‘Over here.’

They have been groping their way forward, blissfully unaware of how they shall be groping there again more terribly before the night is out. Someone finds a switch, and the room is illuminated, with the effect that the garden seems to have drawn back a step as if worsted in the first encounter. But it is only waiting.

The apparently inoffensive chamber thus suddenly revealed is, for a bachelor’s home, creditably like a charming country house drawing room and abounds in the little feminine touches that are so often best applied by the hand of man. There is nothing in the room inimical to the ladies, unless it be the cut flowers which are from the garden and possibly in collusion with it. The fireplace may also be a little dubious. It has been hacked out of a thick wall which may have been there when the other walls were not, and is presumably the cavern where LOB, when alone, sits chatting to himself among the blue smoke. He is as much at home by the fire as any gnome that may be hiding among its shadows; but he is less familiar with the rest of the room, and when he sees it, as for instance on his lonely way to bed, he often stares long and hard at it before chuckling uncomfortably.

There are five ladies, and one only of them is elderly, the MRS. COADE whom a voice in the darkness has already proclaimed the nicest. She is the nicest, though the voice was no good judge. COADY, as she is familiarly called and as her husband also is called, each having for many years been able to answer for the other, is a rounded old lady with a beaming smile that has accompanied her from childhood. If she lives to be a hundred she will pretend to the census man that she is only ninety-nine. She has no other vice that has not been smoothed out of existence by her placid life, and she has but one complaint against the male COADY, the rather odd one that he has long forgotten his first wife. Our MRS. COADY never knew the first one, but it is she alone who sometimes looks at the portrait of her, such as a lock of brown hair, which the equally gentle male COADY must have treasured once but has now forgotten. The first wife had been slightly lame, and in their brief married life he had carried solicitously a rest for her foot, had got so accustomed to doing this, that after a quarter of a century with our MRS. COADY he still finds footstools for her as if she were lame also. She has ceased to pucker her face over this, taking it as a kind little thoughtless attention, and indeed with the years has developed a friendly limp.

Of the other four ladies, all young and physically fair, two are married. MRS. DEARTH is tall, of smouldering eyes and fierce desires, murky beasts lie in ambush in the labyrinths of her mind, she is a white-faced gypsy with a husky voice, most beautiful when she is sullen, and therefore frequently at her best. The other ladies when in conclave refer to her as THE DEARTH. MRS. PURDIE is a safer companion for the toddling kind of man. She is soft and pleading, and would seek what she wants by laying her head on the loved one’s shoulder, while THE DEARTH might attain it with a pistol. A brighter spirit than either is JOANNA TROUT who, when her affections are not engaged, has a merry face and figure, but can dismiss them both at the important moment, which is at the word ‘love.’ Then JOANNA quivers, her sense of humour ceases to beat and the dullest man may go ahead. There remains LADY CAROLINE LANEY of the disdainful poise, lately from the enormously select school where they are taught to pronounce their r’s as w’s; nothing else seems to be taught, but for matrimonial success nothing else is necessary. Every woman who pronounces r as w will find a mate; it appeals to all that is chivalrous in man.

An old-fashioned gallantry induces us to accept from each of these ladies her own estimate of herself, and fortunately it is favourable in every case. This refers to their estimate of themselves up to the hour of ten on the evening on which we first meet them; the estimate may have changed temporarily by the time we part from them on the following morning. What their mirrors say to each of them is: a dear face, not classically perfect but abounding in that changing charm which is the best type of English womanhood; here is a woman who has seen and felt far more than her reticent nature readily betrays; she sometimes smiles, but behind that concession, controlling it in a manner hardly less than adorable, lurks the sigh called Knowledge; a strangely interesting face, mysterious; a line for her tombstone might be: ‘If I had been a man what adventures I could have had...