Blue Stockings defames women in order to defame men; Thark succeeds thanks to a trio of great perfomances

More un-Shakespearean drama at London’s leading Shakespeare venue. The Globe has pushed the Bard off stage to make way for Blue Stockings, by Jessica Swale, which portrays the lives of female students at Girton College, Cambridge, in the 1890s. The script, which veers between weepy romcom and manipulative satire, sets out to elicit a collective gasp of outrage at the sexist piggery of the last century but one. To achieve this Swale has to rely on several fabrications. First, that intelligent women are rare. (Really?) Second, that men seldom meet intelligent women. (Surely they mingle all the time.) Third, that men find intelligent women threatening, tricky and outlandish. (In fact, men find them attractive, stimulating and fun.) That Swale defames men is perhaps less surprising than that she has to defame women as well in order to make the anti-male libel stick. She shows gangs of chortling Cambridge chaps tiptoeing around the Girton gels like Taleban recruits exploring the Bunny Club. These foppish, goofy male bumpkins open their mouths only to blurt out formulaic chauvinism. ‘You want to be a scientist?’ scoffs one. ‘But you’re a woman.’ The play’s top bigot is a wasp-eyed throwback, Dr Maudsley, who sports an Amish beard to emphasise his Stone Age values. He lectures the gels on the subject of hysteria. ‘The overexertion of a woman’s brain at the expense of other vital organs may lead to atrophy, mania, or worse, to her being incapacitated as a mother.’ Many spectators yelled and hissed at this speech, and at the doc’s other misguided utterances, and did so with a degree of relish that seemed rather dispiriting. The play expects us to get our kicks by castigating the Victorians for being Victorians. This beguiling impulse — to censure people for being the people they happen to be — is the quintessence of prejudice.