JM Barrie’s 1901 comedy Quality Street has been somewhat neglected in his homeland of Scotland. The Scottish Theatre Archive shows no professional production of the drama since 1953.
This is a strange state of affairs, as this four-act play is neatly constructed, often very funny and entirely open to modern observations on gender politics. That is certainly true of Liz Carruthers’s clever staging for Pitlochry Festival Theatre (PFT), which, while remaining within Barrie’s frame of Georgian England, is shot through with 21st-century wit and irony.
The drama is set, in 1805 and immediately after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, among the marriageable young ladies and “old maids” of a small English...