Here’s Peter Pan in a tent, an airy and elegant tent, and a pretty special tent too. It’s been raised only a few flaps of a fairy’s wings from the famous statue of the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. And here or hereabouts the Man Who Couldn’t Grow Up larked about with the boys who obsessed him and inspired his play. As J. M. Barrie wrote of the Llewelyn Davies clan in his whimsical but weird dedication: “I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame.”
The tent is special for another reason. Above and around a circular stage there’s a cyclorama on which the designer William Dudley gives us everything from the Neverland jungles to a pirate ship, to bits of fast-moving London. Up, up, away and eastwards fly Abby Ford’s demure Wendy and her brothers over the Albert Hall, past Nelson and over St Paul’s to join the Lost Boys in what is presumably deepest Essex.
The plot is pretty much as Barrie wanted it, but the dialogue has been so rejigged by Tanya Ronder, you are startled when an authentic line surfaces, like Pan’s “to die will be an awfully big adventure”. Never mind the new ending, which makes a kind of sense.
But should Peter’s uninterest in sex be as emphasised as much as it is when, say, a sensuously undulating Tigerlily comes close to stripping to her feather headdress?
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And should Tinkerbell morph from a darting light into Itxaso Moreno in a fluffy skirt? She’s a sprite so sulky and malicious it’s hard to call out your belief in fairies in order to save her from poisoning. A double dose of hemlock seems more apt.
Still, Ciaran Kellgren makes a tough, cool Pan who nimbly skims and gambols, then bangs and stamps in angry defiance of grown-ups. And Jonathan Hyde’s Hook is a debonair dandy who casually murders an underling, yet mostly substitutes melancholy for menace, lying in his hammock and wailing out his night fears and pirate miseries. But for better or worse, or both, it is the stage effects I’ll remember.
These include rough-theatre stuff — the dog Nana is shunted about by a puppeteer and a canvas-and-wicker crocodile is moved by two cyclists half-hidden within — but also plenty of digital wizardry. Best of all is an underwater scene, with an acrobatic mermaid twisting up and down on a rope.
Is it ungrateful, then, to say I’d have liked a bit more Barrie and a bit less spectacle? Probably.
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