Dear Brutus

by J.M. Barrie

Dear Brutus is a haunting drama by the famous author and playwright J. M. Barrie. The story concerns a mysterious old woman from a remote English village. When eight strangers stumble upon an enchanted forest they are compelled to enter. Upon finding the old woman, she invites them to dinner, a dinner that will change their lives forever.
Odin’s Library Classics is dedicated to bringing the world the best of humankind’s literature from throughout the ages. Carefully selected, each work is unabridged from classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama.

Genres: Plays, Classics, Fantasy, British Literature, Fiction, Theatre, Drama

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successful novels and plays.

The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh. He took up journalism for a newspaper in Nottingham and contributed to various London journals before moving there in 1885. His early Auld Licht Idylls (1889) and A Window in Thrums (1889) contain fictional sketches of Scottish life representative of the Kailyard school. The publication of The Little Minister (1891) established his reputation as a novelist. During the next decade, Barrie continued to write novels, but gradually, his interest turned towards the theatre.

In London, he met Llewelyn Davies, who inspired him about magical adventures of a baby boy in gardens of Kensington, included in The Little White Bird, then to a "fairy play" about this ageless adventures of an ordinary girl, named Wendy, in the setting of Neverland. People credited this best-known play with popularizing Wendy, the previously very unpopular name, and quickly overshadowed his previous, and he continued successfully.

Following the deaths of their parents, Barrie unofficially adopted the boys. He gave the rights to great Ormond street hospital, which continues to benefit.

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this by way of Carol and Drina, both of whom play the part of Margaret. Which is to say I already had an idea of the play's direction even before I read it, and a certain degree of approval, too, given the way two separate authors had glowingly described it. Here, for example, from Carol Goes on the Stage:

Carol took a deep breath, flung back her head, and sprinted out into the moonlight, calling over her shoulder, "Daddy! Daddy! I have won! Here is the place!"

She was dimly aware as she made her entrance that somebody was doing something to the lights. The tree, as she approached it, glimmered with an increased, dazzling brilliance, and a moment later a soft spotlight fell upon her, following her, so that wherever she went the eerie sinister green of the wood was blotted out by radiance.

If all you get from that is that Margaret's a part good enough for the protagonist of a novel, along with an emphasis on lighting and an evil wood, you've got the gist of it.

Though that's not quite the full experience of reading the play, it turns out. Dear Brutus is Barrie's elaboration on the Caesar quote, how the fault is in ourselves. It presents a wood that only appears at Midsummer, in the garden of a puckish little man name Lob, in which characters get those second chances they always imagine having. Mostly, they make the same decisions all over again, even in different circumstances, which is spun out really well once they get out of the wood and recognize these truths. But then there's Dearth, who wanted a child, and gets a daughter - just for an hour - and comes out of the wood knowing exactly what he's missing.

It's a heartbreaking bit of poignancy in a play that's largely satirical. What's that phrase - so sharp you don't realize you've cut yourself? That's the degree of wit here.

The satire is helped by the stage directions. A big chunk of the text is stage direction; I'd like to see an adaptation just to see a) how directors handle Barrie's instructions and b) how the work stands without those directions, which lend the work such a strong sense of place and mood. I mean, just look at this writing:

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 moon-shine. 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.

I know this isn't as famous as Peter Pan - no movie or Broadway musical about the writing of this one! - but Dear Brutus is funny and smart and beautifully written, and just a little bit devastating. Which means I like it much more than I've ever liked Peter Pan.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/b0bn...

Description: AIn a magic wood, on Midsummer's eve, a second chance is offered to those who believe they've taken the wrong turning in life. Some will take the same path, while others will have a precious glimpse of what can now never be...

Written in 1917, JM Barrie's play was adapted by Jeffrey Segal.

Starring Bernard Hepton as Dearth; Frances Jeater as Jenny Dearth; Jenny Quayle as Margaret; Lob as Jeffrey Segal; Geoffrey Beevers as Jack Purdie; Carole Boyd as Mabel Purdie; Jane Knowles as Joanna Trout; Stephen Thorne as James Matey; Brenda Kaye as Lady Caroline Laney: Anthony Newlands as Mr Coade; and Katherine Parr as Mrs Coade.

Written over a decade after Peter Pan, JM Barrie's title is taken from a line in 'Julius Caesar' summing up Shakespeare's argument that we should take responsibility for our own actions: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves that we are underlings.'

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

ENGLISH: I watched this comedy many years ago on RTVE and was not impressed. Now I have read it, and have liked it a lot. I think Barrie's plays are meant to be read, rather than watched, for the best they have are the author's comments, which are lost when watching the play.

The plot revolves around the possibility of having a "second chance," of starting a new life. The characters sometimes come to the conclusion that the second chance would not have been better than the first. In general, everyone learns something from the experience.

ESPAÑOL: Vi esta comedia hace muchos años en Estudio-1 y no me impresionó. Ahora la he leído, y me ha gustado mucho. Creo que las obras de teatro de Barrie son para leerlas, más que para verlas, porque lo mejor que tienen son los comentarios del autor, que al ver la obra se pierden.

El argumento gira sobre la posibilidad de tener una "segunda oportunidad", de comenzar una nueva vida. Los personajes llegan a veces a la conclusión de que esa segunda oportunidad no habría sido mejor que la primera. En general, todos aprenden algo de la experiencia.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC radio 4 Extra:
4 Extra Debut. Midsummer's Eve. In a magic wood, a second chance awaits people who have taken a wrong turn in life. Stars Bernard Hepton. From February 1987.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/b0bn...

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been my bath-time reading for a while, and I finished it tonight. It was an excellent bath book; fairly cheerful, clever, and funny, and yet thoughtful.

When I started it I was kinda...

Can't tell if funny... off-putting...
I wasn't sure at first if the narrator was very tongue-in-cheek or actually serious. It becomes clear really early on, though, that it's the former. And it's really funny. And sweet. And rather sad. It's sad for my favourite characters, but really lovely for my runners-up.
Also, I was so pleased with how the philanderer ended up. That was really, really well done.
Actual quote:
JOANNA: It's so lovely not to be married to you, Jack.
JACK: (spiritless) I can understand that.

I see in Margaret Hopkins' Spring and Fall. I'm sure that's not an accident. Literary references abound, this was just my favourite.

I'm not sure how well this translates to stage, or if it's meant to be one of those plays that are read and not performed, because the stage directions are a.) hilarious and b.) very important to the tone of the thing. You'd need to really ham it up, I think, to make it come across with the same kind of feeling. Actually, if you hammed it up, it would lose something, because part of the hilarity is in how serious everyone takes themselves. So yeah, I dunno.
Really good read, though.

Re-read in 2020:
This book is really fun to teach. Watching a bunch of teenagers try to puzzle out what went wrong with the Dearth's marriage is really funny and interesting, even though in the end I had to point it out to them.
I actually read it twice in a very short time-span, because we also did it as a Covid-19 online read-along for drama club. I pulled parts out of a hat and away we went. The play is SO funny in places, and then shifts tone to be so heart-wrenching, but it's all handled so beautifully. It would be great to see it (or be in it), but the entire group agreed that a narrator would be required as the stage directions are pretty fundamental to the story.

[Jasmine · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's real weird, but it's also very funny.

[Ebster Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a play about second chances and how useless they are.

A group of middle aged couples are given a chance to re-write their lives when they are invited to 'the wood' a magical place that appears once a year (on midsummer eve) in this one guy's backyard.

Most storis along this line of thinking deal with how life's choices change our character, or rather how our character is defined by the choices we make, and that is what I was expecting from this story. (Thinking in partucular of a lot of time travel stories)

Mr Barrie completely disagrees with this line of thinking.

Character isn't formed by accident. Getting the "right" job or marrying the "right" person doesn't complete you. It takes effort to become the person you want to be.

The tone of the story is thoughtful, but there are some pretty funny and some sad parts too (Particularly Margaret the Might-Have-Been).

It's dumb that the character's are referred to as Mr or Mrs Last Name but in dialogue are referred to by First Name. Makes it super-difficult to keep track of who's married to who when they're talking.

As was the case with "A Kiss For Cinderella" I'd really like to see this as a play to see how the heck they translated some of these ideas from the page to the stage.

[Orçun Güzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bu tiyatro oyununda, orta yaş civarındaki bir grup mutsuz insan, sadece yaz gündönümünde ortaya çıkan sihirli bir ormana, ikinci şanslarını denemek üzere çekiliyorlar. Harika bir fanteziden yol çıkmış Barrie, ama sonuca çok da müthiş diyemem. Yani ana fikri anladım ama bu ilginç fikir, daha ilginç bir şekilde de işlenebilirdi. Oyunun adı, Shakespeare'in Julius Caesar oyunundan bir alıntıya dayanıyor: "Kabahat sevgili Brütüs, yıldızlarımızda değil, bizdedir; başkasının emrinde olduğumuz için." (Bu oyunda 3. perdede geçiyor.)

Maya Kitap, Peter Pan yazarı J.M. Barrie'nin hayatına değinen, oyunun İngiltere'de sahnelenişinden fotoğraflar içeren ve hepsinden önemlisi çevirisi iyi olan leziz bir kitap hazırlamış. Atladıkları tek nokta var: "Türkçe'de ilk kez yayınlanıyor." ifadesi. Orhan Burian 1944'te MEB yayınları için "Kabahat Kendimizde" başlığıyla bu oyunu çevirmişti ve MEB'den en yenisi 2004'te olmak üzere birkaç baskı yapmıştı - bir bibliyofil olarak bunu da not edeyim.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

My evaluation of this play is probably permanently clouded by the fog of reminiscence. I played a part in this play when I was a senior in high school. It would be interesting to see the rest of the cast now, and ask if they'd be any different if allowed to enter that magic wood again.

[Wanda]

15 OCT 2018 - a recommendation through Dear Bettie. Many Thanks.

Listen here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/b0bn...

[Ren · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Read this play because I am auditioning for it on January. It has some good ideas, not very fleshed out characters or plot. Some of it is very dated and sexist

[Mariangel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic comedy in which a group of people get a second chance.

[Vansa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t read anything by JM Barrie apart from Peter Pan. This work is every bit as profound while also being just as whimsical and well-written. Written in 1917, this is Barrie’s exploration of alternative futures that can arise from just taking a different turn at a crossroads of your life, a metaphor that characters in the play return to over and over again. A group of people, mostly belonging to the high society of London, are invited for a Midsummers Night dinner party to the countryside manor of Lob, an eccentric who all of them are acquainted with ( on a side note, fiction is sprinkled with warnings about never attending countryside estate parties in England!). Barrie then proceeds to introduce you to the characters through a series of really well-done scenes: quick little character sketches dashed off in the matter of a few lines, enough to give you a sense of who these people are and what drives them. There’s one that I particularly liked where a man and his girlfriend are spouting faux-noble cliches to each other about how bad they feel that they’re deceiving his wife, but that doesn’t extend to them breaking off the affair, and there’s a hilariously cynical scene where his wife steps into this conversation, and their nobility quickly devolves into outrage that she isn’t more appreciative of them! Like all of us, every character has made a particular choice in their life that’s taken them to where they are now, and Lob encourages them to all go take a walk in the forest that’s sprung up behind his house-a forest that leads them down different paths, both literally and metaphorically, where they see different versions of themselves. It’s very well-done, things are just a little different, but their personalities remain the same, and the play ends with all of them ending up back at the estate, in their old selves. They remember their alternate futures though, and in a remarkably non-preachy way, come to terms with their lives, and it’s a very clever piece of writing, the ways in which all of them end up returning to the estate and not staying in their alternate lives. Barrie seems to want to make the point that where you are is where you would always end up, regardless of the paths you took to get there. One particularly poignant strand revolves around a childless couple-a painter and his wife wishes she had married better. In the enchanted forest (such as it is), the painter has a little girl he’s very close to. His return to the estate, ostensibly to get food for someone who needs it in the forest, is greeted with the most dismay by the others when he mentions that he needs to return to his daughter-the others knowing that he can’t go back to that, and has, in effect, lost a child. ( Something that struck me was that this is the second work of fiction that deals with the loss of a child, either through growing up, or as in this work, disappearing-possibly because he saw the effect on his mother of the early death of his brother as a child, and the untimely deaths of 2 of the Llewelyn-Davies boys who inspired his most famous work) This brings the painter and his wife closer though, in a sort of shared loss which is a lovely resolution. My favourite of all the endings was the one given to the philandering couple, delightfully subversive. He gives an old couple who feel jaded with their marriage a moving resolution too. This is a surprisingly modern play , that seems to get overshadowed by Barrie’s other work, when it should be as famous-and I'm sure Borges has read this, it should be at least as famous as 'Garden of forking paths', it's a lot more pointed!

[Junius Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only know of J.M. Barrie as the author of Peter Pan, which I must have read when I was young but don't remember well. I picked up Dear Brutus to see if it would be suitable for my fairies class, and let me just open with: wow!

The title is a reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Act I, Scene III, L. 140-141). It begins rather like a murder mystery: a group of people have been summoned together on Midsummer's Eve for they know not what purpose by a host whom they scarcely know. The journey they are launched on takes them deep into themselves, revealing what they have worked so studiously to avoid for so long.

It is all done with such a deft touch, with love for the characters, with great humor, and great sorrow at the right places: all in the space of 100 pages. It is a play, but it doesn't read very much like one, and in fact I would find it hard to imagine how one could transfer all that is on the page to the stage.

I cannot recommend this one enough. It's a matter of a couple of hours to read and it is well worth the journey. I shall have to pay more attention to Barrie in the future.

[Aurora · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this lay, Barrie invokes Shakespeare, setting the action in an English country manor with a magical woods that only appears on Midsummer night's eve. Several couples and the butler venture into the words after complaining singly and in groups about the unfairness of fate and the greenness of the grass in someone else's pastures.
In the woods, Barrie grants his characters their wish - a second chance with a different fate, but then quotes the words of Cassius in Shakespeare's play "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings" to remind us that "fate" is often what we make of it.
Barrie is very much a creature of his time, and as in Peter Pan and The Admiral Crichton, his better known works, his upper class is a prisoner of it's own pre-conceptions, roles and relationships with the servant class.
While it borrows heavily from Shakespeare's story for it's setting and some of it's plot, Dear Brutus can hardly be called a comedy, at least in the modern sense. It is, however, a useful commentary on Britain at the turn of the 20th century and I enjoyed discovering a new J.M. Barrie work I'd never experienced before.

[April Mccaffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very whimsical, funny and sad story.

The characters were very interesting and this play was very easy to read as a play/story. Purdie was certainly an arrogant womanizer who led both Mabel and Joanna on a merry chase but after he came out of the woods, he seemed to realise what he was.

Will Dearth character was also really interesting and really heartbreaking. Because all he wanted in life was to have a daughter and he got that but only for such a short amount of time. Alice was so cruel to him in many ways as he was a disappointment to her and it was such a lovely fatherly/daughter moment between Will and Margaret.

Lob is also an interesting character and certainly reminds me of Puck, hence why Purdie references him from the Shakespeare play a Midsummer night's dream.

I'm seeing this next Saturday in London at Southwark Playhouse so I'm intrigued to see how it is dne.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Peter Pan this too is a fantasia with a moral. A number of ladies and gents are guests at Lob's house (Lob is another name of Puck, the mischievous elf).

The guests have one thing in common: they wish they could live their lives over again. They believe that if they got another chance they would order their lives more wisely.

It is mid-summer eve when strange things can happen. The garden of Lob's house turns into a magic wood, and since it is moonlit night, the guests wander into it. For a time their dreams come true.

Mr. Purdie who wished he had married Joana rather then Mabel (his present wife) finds himself married to Joana, but wishes he had wed Mabel. Will Dearth, the artist, gets the daughter of his dreams, but loses her in pursuit of a pretty woman.

Surreal but wonderful I must say.

[Mbuye · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Dear Brutus,’ a 1917 presentation, shows how eager the British public was for escapist and fantasy literature while the war still raged. Barrie, the master of whimsy, here gives us a new version of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ where nothing is as it is in real life, but is lived through a lens of ‘might-have-been,’ and where the characters seemingly get their second chance to be better, kindlier persons. As they return to the real world, the question really is, do their insights into their own personalities have any bearing on the future? If nothing else, it strips them of false illusion and leaves them with the realisation of their own mediocrity. Is that bad? Perhaps not; it helps them discard the what-if’s and might-have-beens and work towards a humbler reality, in which lies a greater happiness. It is not in externals, but in ourselves, that we carve out who we are.

[Eva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Older works can be hard to stomach, but I had liked this one up until this moment.

JOANNA A strange experiment, Matey; does it ever have any permanent effect?
MATEY (on whom it has had none) So far as I know, not often, miss; but, I believe, once in a while.

I find it hard to believe that these people (who had collectively found love, joy, and terrible truths about themselves) would so easily dismiss all this. If you knew one change would greatly improve your life, wouldn't you pursue it?

[Michael P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm feeling generous. A group of philandering "tennis anyone" types go into the woods a la A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM and come out better people. I do not find the characters interesting, it all seems a bit contrived, and though the resonance with DREAM is obvious, Barrie misdirects us to think of AS YOU LIKE IT several times, which is just strange. I did enjoy all the Shakespeare references, however, so I'm feeling generous when it comes to handing out stars.

[LC · Rating 1 out of 5]

What IS this book? Why did I even pick it to read? Is this really how people spoke to one another in 1917 or is it a factor of being from another country? The language is so different And difficult to understand. The best thing about the book was it’s brevity. Crack-in-my-eye-Tommy? Even google has no idea what that means!

[Gavy · Rating 3 out of 5]

an incredible play with complex characters and a surprisingly deep message that's true to humanity, inspiring and chastising at the same time ... but a totally failed comedy

it ends with a man losing a daughter he thought was real and sobbing with his head in his hands as other people just start eating breakfast around him????? that's not funny????? it's sad????

[Çisem Uçar · Rating 4 out of 5]

People who are not satisfied with their choices should read this. The storytelling is fluent and witty. The character desciptions are captivating.

And also, if you love reading theatre, read this, visualisation is so good!

"The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

[JohnMichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was not familiar with this play until I was asked to take part in a Zoom reading of it. Timely in its message today, it asks the question of whether it is our choices that make us who we are, or is it who we are that determines our choices? I would love to see a fully-staged production of this.

[Sheryl Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book for the most part. There are so many characters that I had a hard time keeping track. The whole concept of the book and going into the forest to get a second chance was intriguing. I was surprised by what happened when they came out of the forest.

[Jane Irish Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Play script. When a character in a book I read recently had the opportunity to play Margaret in this play, I was intrigued enough to seek it out and read it. Unfortunately, despite a descriptive foreword, I still found it confusing. Perhaps it works better on stage.

[Mijn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit of a dry read (and weird) but it's an interesting play

[corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really hope my school does this play. We read this play in my theatre class and we fell in love it. It’s a very mystical musical. Worth the read!

[Glimmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

More midsummer night dream and less Julius Cesar.

[Hania · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cute little story about what could have been.