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.