The Stage

What Every Woman Knows

Published Monday 15 June 2009 at 14:45 by Peter Cargill

There is always eager anticipation when Pitlochry Festival Theatre tackles a period piece. Its reputation for costume and set design has been well earned and the staging of JM Barrie’s classic What Every Woman Knows, with chief executive John Durnin wearing his director’s hat, is no exception.

Adrian Rees’ settings flit between the sumptuous parlour in the Wylie family’s house in Edinburgh to a garden room in Surrey via a hairdresser’s shop in Glasgow and a study in London - all with consummate ease.

Written before female emancipation, when women were considered the legal property of their fathers or husbands, Barrie’s play merely reveals what “every woman knows” - that she is the invisible power behind any successful man.

Christopher Daley plays John Shand with great stoicism as befits his ambitious nature, treating success as if it was his by right. And Irene Allan makes an impressive Pitlochry debut as Maggie Wylie, quietly knitting away while stitching together a few plots of her own.

Local favourite and Pitlochry doyen Martyn James is Maggie’s father with Greg Powrie and Alan Steele as brothers James and David.

Gillian Ford is suitably upper crust as Lady Sybil with a neat line in dumb blondeness, with Elizabeth Graham as her mother the Comtesse de la Briere. Robin Harvey Edwards and Sandy Batchelor make telling contributions in a couple of roles each with George Rae and Gavin Jon Wright completing the line-up as a couple of electors.

The climax is as corny as ever, but, unlike Shand, laughs will come easy to members of the audience.