Theatre
Peter Pan (National)
Flights of fancy
Sheridan Morley
Aong with no other theatregoer I have ever met above the age of ten, I have all my life believed that J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan is the greatest British play of the century. A vast, poetic, sprawling, dark masterpiece about life and death and love and loss and crocodiles and fairies who will die unless children applaud them, it stands so far out- side the regular canon, and is often so unwieldy in its ambitions, that its nearest relative would probably be Ibsen's Peer Gynt written only a few years earlier.
Happily, we now have 'The boy who would not grow up' on the main Olivier stage of the National, where it should have been at least 20 years ago; admittedly this version is not entirely new, having first been devised and staged by Trevor Nunn and his Les Miserables partner John Caird for the Barbican back in 1982. Nunn has now dropped out as co-director, to be replaced by Fiona Laird, but in essence many of their original intentions remain intact; Peter is again played by a boy (an Innovation they introduced) and we now have Alec McCowen in superb form as the crusty Scots Barrie himself to lead us through the still labyrinthine plot as narra- tor, observer and ultimate moralist.
The set this time is the most lavish ever seen at the National, even though John Napier's designs have now gone so far over the top that his Mermaid Lagoon resem- bles nothing so closely as the backdrop for an Esther Williams pool movie of the early 1950s. There are, in fact, so many things wrong with this Peter Pan, and so much right with it, that in the end it becomes a kind of high-scoring draw between the author and the production team.
What gives the play its eternal fascina- tion is, at least for me, the cost to Barrie of writing his only real classic: of the five 'Lost Boys' he picked up by the round pond in Kensington Gardens where Pan's statue now stands, two committed suicide and three others said that their lives were never the same after the play first opened in 1928. Barrie's motives have always been at least a little suspect in regard to his love for the young lads, and the chances are that nowadays he, like Lewis Carroll, might have found himself having a quiet word with the local child protection agency. But Peter Pan was undoubtedly his lifelong obsession, and Caird and Nunn have tried to wrap up most if not all of its many ver- sions into this one three-hour extravagan- za; not just the 1928 play but the 1911 novel, the New York version of 1905 and the screenplay Barrie himself wrote for an unproduced Charlie Chaplin silent of 1920. Mercifully, they have given the Walt Dis- ney and Steven Spielberg travesties a wide berth, but even so we get moments of unforgivable parody and joltiness as though the directors are beginning to lose faith not only in the play but, more disastrously, in the audience to cope with its psychological complexities and sexual uneasiness.
True, this Pan does restore to us the almost unknown last act, in which years after the children have flown home to their Darling household Peter returns, only to find that Wendy has done the unforgivable and got married; still, there is always her daughter to be kidnapped and flown to the Neverland which lies just beyond the sec- ond star to the right and then straight on till morning. Far and away the most heart- breaking moments in the show occur at the very end, when Alec McCowen's narrator flies us out of the past and into the future to show us the terrible things like banks and bishoprics which have befallen the boys who allowed themselves, under Wendy's influence, to grow up reasonably normal instead of flapping around Peter's lost island staging battles with pirates.
As the pirate chief (and also of course the children's father Mr Darling, a double that has been traditional since the play was first staged) Ian McKellen seems oddly subdued, able neither to feel nor inspire the terror that lies behind the hook hand; but the rest of the casting works well enough, with Daniel Evans as a charismatic Peter and Claudie Blakely as an unusually tough, feminist Wendy.
Again some very weird liberties have been taken with the text; some of Hook's great speech from the pirate ship, a parody of Irving and Tree and all the actor-man- agers Barrie most disliked for their histri- onics, appears to have been cut heavily, and 'Oh dark and sinister man' was never intended as the cue for some cheap malapropisms. Equally shameful is the moment when McKellen, having just reverted from Hook to Darling, allows an echo of Hook to invade his nursery perfor- mance in the doghouse. These and many more are self-referential gags which chip away at the original, while the late Stephen Oliver's score still hovers uneasily between background music and full-blown operetta. Given the deviser-directors' expertise with Les Miserables it would surely have made more sense to allow this production to become the musical it so aches to be by simply borrowing the Jule Styne/Mary Mar- tin Broadway score which remains one of the best I have ever heard and vastly more loyal to the original Barrie plan.
But if the true heart of darkness is miss- ing here, we still have more than enough; this must be the first Peter Pan ever to be stolen by a Narrator whom Barrie never intended to be on stage, but as Peter and his boys soar though the auditorium and Hook sinks into the teeth of a crocodile apparently on loan from Jaws, it suddenly becomes clear that, like Alan Bennett's Wind in the Willows, the National has a Christmas treat to see it safely though the millennium, by which time they might even have managed to pay for it.
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