Ageless Battle in War Between the Sexes : Theater * Shaw’s ‘The Philanderer,’ which opens Friday at SCR, examines a liberated woman, an old-fashioned woman and a cad.

When George Bernard Shaw wrote his second play, “The Philanderer,” it was a topical comedy about what was then a hot debate in Victorian society: the New (as in “liberated”) Woman.

He apparently didn’t expect his 1893 play to remain current much longer than the daily newspaper. “The more topical the play, the more it dates,” Shaw wrote. “ ‘The Philanderer’ suffers from this complaint.”

Surprise, George. “The Philanderer” is heading the list of South Coast Repertory’s new season, its 36th that will take the Costa Mesa theater troupe into the year 2000.

When “The Philanderer” opens its regular run Friday, the play will be 106 years old. Yet director David Emmes calls the play “remarkably relevant, an overlooked gem. It deals with feminism, animal rights, even the issue of the medical profession and its controversies. It’s terribly relevant today.”

In “The Philanderer,” the title character, Leonard Charteris, wants the love of women but not the commitment. He wants Love Lite.

“Advanced people form charming friendships,” he says. “Conventional people marry.” Is it his fault so many women fall in love with him? They should not cry when he abandons them, because “you know I can’t help it.”

But he’s in a fix. The beautiful Julia Craven, with whom he has dallied many a time, wants him and won’t let go. She is Shaw’s conventional woman, demanding, weeping, creating scenes and conniving to secure that one object she must have to survive--a man.

To escape Julia, Charteris proposes marriage to Grace Tranfield, a widow and Shaw’s New Woman, one of determination and self-respect. Throughout the play, Charteris is in constant fear that she might actually accept.

How these three characters, and the women’s old-guard fathers, react to the situation forms the heart of the play. But Shaw adds to the mix Dr. Paramore, a prominent London physician, so Shaw can aim some darts at vivisection and the medical profession in general.

Emmes, SCR’s producing artistic director, first saw the play more than a decade ago in the United Kingdom and put it on his list. “I was really taken by it,” he said. “We have been working our way through the Shaw canon [having produced “Man and Superman,” “You Never Can Tell,” “Heartbreak House,” “Arms and the Man,” “Major Barbara” and “Misalliance”], and I thought this was an apt time to do it.”

Though fond of Shaw’s plays, Emmes concedes they are particularly challenging. Shaw, a socialist pamphleteer and self-described specialist in “heretical” plays, had ideas to espouse.

“So often you think of his characters as just talking heads, all intellectual,” Emmes said. “What I sought to do is make these living, breathing characters with an emotional life fueling their thoughts, backing up the intelligence and wit with real character wants and needs.”

That has turned out to be difficult, said Kaitlin Hopkins, who portrays Grace Tranfield, the New Woman. Her character is the embodiment of Shaw’s ideal woman, “but you can’t play ideas. There’s no character in that,” Hopkins said.

“She’s struggling to become this New Woman, this advanced woman, trying to stand by her principles, even though she was raised entirely differently.

“I try to relate to her struggle, which I think is a very common struggle for women now, which is the struggle between allowing yourself to be pretty and sexy and still be taken seriously as a professional, intelligent woman.”

Shaw doesn’t resolve these issues in the play, “but that’s OK, I think,” Hopkins said. “I don’t think they’ll ever be resolved. It’s 1999, and I don’t see any resolution.”

Douglas Weston, who portrays the philandering Charteris, said his is “a bedeviling role, unlike any I have played before. He is elusive to me.” Charteris’ intentions and motivations seem to vary from act to act.

“What I think I’ve finally found out is that he’s vamping through the whole situation. He uses his philosophy--which I think he really does believe in very much--in very human ways to gain his own goals.”

The character Julia Craven agrees. In the final act she delivers her poignant, sincere appraisal of Charteris: “He cares for only one person in the world, and that is himself. There is not in his whole nature one unselfish spot.”

So are we to feel any sympathy for Charteris? “Oh, I hope so,” Weston said. “He’s a bit of a cad, but I think we can still love and feel sympathy for him.”

Emmes has tried to make it so. “In the best sense of the word, he will live up to the term ‘philanderer.’ He is charming, engaging. The audience does not have to approve of him, but I think there will be a positive response.”

Surely Shaw intended some sympathy for Charteris, because the character is, in some ways, George Bernard Shaw himself. The play is autobiographical in that Shaw found himself in a similar situation of trying to break off with a clinging, violent lover while dallying with another.

“My genius for hurting women is extraordinary, and I always do it with the best intentions,” Shaw wrote.

The year Shaw wrote “The Philanderer,” a female friend described him as “adored by many women” and “a born philanderer.” Wrote another: “The grossest flatterer I ever met . . . and yet is one of the most fascinating men I ever met.”

Shaw eventually married a nurse who had cared for him, then conducted an apparently celibate marriage. He vented his passions in letters to women friends.

“Love loses its charm when it is not free,” Shaw wrote in an article in 1890. The self-sacrificing woman--the so-called “womanly” woman of Victorian times--is supposedly revered but actually held in disrespect, Shaw declared.

“Woman, if she dares face the fact that she is being so treated, must either loathe herself or else rebel.”

* “The Philanderer,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 10. $28-$47. (714) 708-5555. Running time: about 2 hours, 30 minutes. Previews tonight and Thursday, 8 p.m., $18-$37. Plus a “pay what you will” performance Saturday, 2:30 p.m. $5 minimum suggested.