Magazine


Review: Edwardian chick-lit

Alan Hulme
20/ 1/2006

We take a look at JM Barrie's What Every Woman Knows, at the Royal Exchange.

LITTLE-KNOWN period pieces with lots of lavish frocks and flying furniture have been a house speciality over the years, and here we go again.

This time it's an Edwardian Chick-Lit Rom-Com from the attic of J M (Peter Pan) Barrie and it's predictably going down a storm with the Exchange faithful.

The so-Scottish Wylie family take aspiring but stupid and priggish young scholar, John Shand, under their wing, paying for his studies, providing he marries daughter of the house, Maggie.

Shand becomes a successful MP, indulges in some extra marital dalliance and finally realises that it's Maggie who is actually the power behind his success.

It's an early women's lib tale and it's reasonably entertaining, though rather oddly contrived.

Competently done, very much in the house style, there are decent performances from Jenny Ogilvie and Mark Arends as Maggie and John and scene-stealing cameos from Gabrielle Drake, as a French Comtesse, and Michael Elwyn, as a cabinet minister.

What Every Woman Knows is on at the Royal Exchange until February 25.


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