Cast
Nana/Crocodile
Mahsen Nouri

Michael Darling
David Poynor

John Darling
Arthur Wilson

Wendy Darling
Abby Ford

Mrs Darling
Karen Ascoe

Capatin Hook/
Mr Darling
Jonathan Hyde

Tinkerbell
Itxaso Moreno

Peter Pan
Ciaran Kellgran

Cookson
Adam Speers

Alf Mason
Dan Wheeler

Tigerlily
Amber Rose Revah

Mermaid
Fiona Lait

Jane Darling Samantha Hopkins

Director
Ben Harrison

Set, Costume and 3D projection Design
Bill Dudley

Adaptor
Tanya Ronder

Music composed and conducted by
Ben Wallfisch

Choreographer
Fleur Darkin

Sound Designer
Greg Clarke

Lighting Designer
Mark Henderson

Fighting Director
Nicholas Hall

Illusions
Paul Kieve

Casting Director
Alison Chard CDG

‘It was evenbetter than the Sound of Music,’ said my two neices (aged 10 and 7), exhilarated after watching Peter Pan. You can’t get higher praise than that. A stunning set that circles the audience (like the Planetarium) – the landscape of a revamped, fairy-tale London with a drowned Albert Memorial as Never-Never-Land. Fabulous special effects – flying and swimming that are breathtakingly real, a low-lying articulated crocodile like a dinosaur skeleton with a big snapping head.
      But it isn’t just a matter of special effects, nor is the production just for children – the acting and the updating of this Edwardian story are subtle and telling. Any saccharine in the original has been removed. Peter Pan (Ciaran Kellgren) is much closer to the accurate view of children’s vulnerable hardness in that classic account of childhood adventure, Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica, than to J M Barrie whimsy. An aloof, wiry, charismatic adolescent, he is brusque and unsentimental about death, ruthless in pursuit of his own desires. In fact this is more a saga of retarded adolescence than of prolonged childhood. Children who have been loved and looked after get to a stage where they need to let go of their parents. Peter Pan, who flew away too early, returned to find a resented younger sibling, and flew off again because certain that his mother didn’t want him, has been unparented. He wants to be forever mothered, irresponsible, free.
      With their normally burgeoning sexuality, the girls – Wendy, Tinkerbell, Tigerlily, even the Mermaids – all want Peter. Tinkerbell (Itxaso Moreno, funny and aggressive in a dirty pink tutu and bovver boots) is jealous of Wendy (the moving Abby Ford), and actually tells the Lost Boys to shoot the Wendy-bird down. Tigerlily (Amber Rose Revah) does a provocative dance to entice Peter. But while the girls are making the natural transference to adulthood, he repudiates it. In Never-Never-Land, he insists on being Wendy’s son, on a par with the Lost Boys, rather than a husband-, father-figure, and he is repelled by Tigerlily’s sexy dance, which is in fact inappropriate, in the true sense, for children (my seven year-old neice said ‘It was spooky, and Peter Pan didn’t like it either’). Wendy often asks him, ‘How do you feel about me, Peter?’ ‘What are you to me, Peter?’ to which, to her bitter disappointment, he answers, ‘Like a devoted son’. It is to come to terms with her sexuality that Wendy leaves Never-Never-Land and goes home to reality.
      Astute comments on the pains of growing up, in a matured version of J M Barrie, were spiced with funny and convincing touches (it was odd, though, that Barrie was nowhere credited at all). Mrs Darling (Karen Ascoe) reproaches Mr Darling (Jonathan Hyde) for enjoying the publicity and autograph-giving involved in his children’s disappearance. Captain Hook (also Jonathan Hyde – a nice Freudian touch) is a disappointed toff who used to obey all the rules, and has been educated at Eton, where he was a golden boy with great promise of success. Prone to hilarious soliloquies, he is a touching villain because he has failed in life.
      But, as well as accruing these more sophisticated treatments of adolescence and wickedness, the essential pathos of the Barrie original is maintained – the Lost Boys longing for their mothers, Mrs Darling coming into the nursery to find that her children have returned (though perhaps Karen Ascoe could have been more moving in this scene), the poignancy when Peter Pan returns to meet the now grown-up Wendy. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ shes say, ‘but you never came.’ But she adds that she has made her choice, she has grown up, and that the Lost Boys now work in offices and have paunches (a perfect apotheosis of this production’s theme).
      Altogether a magical, thought-provoking evening for children and adults alike. And with a heart-breakingly nostalgic end. Peter Pan bursts into tears when Wendy rejects him, but then Wendy’s daughter finds him. ‘Why are you crying, boy?’ she asks, as her mother did before her – the whole cycle, like the spinning diorama set, is going round all over again.
Jane O’Grady