Assembly Checkpoint

One of the buzziest and frankly most bewildering hits of this year’s fringe is Club NVRLND, a work of (I guess) immersive club theatre that attracted a very large, very enthusiastic crowd on the Tuesday night I saw it. Setting aside the fact it’s a hit, and donning my ‘critic bastard’ hat, the nicest thing I can say about Club NVRLAND is that the creative team have done a wonderful job of coming up with an idea for a show that people – including a lot of young people – are clearly hugely into. But Club NVRLND could have been done better. It feels like a distant cousin to the recent West End musical smash & Juliet, but made by people with no experience or aptitude for musical theatre. As you might guess, the show – conceived of and directed by Steven Kunis – is a riff on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, set a nebulous number of years after the events of the original story. Peter is on the cusp of 30, and Wendy is now on the verge of getting married. We first meet her as she stumbles tearily in her dress to the door of Club NVRLND, which is – of course – good old Neverland reimagined as a nightclub. There are a few oddities with this: Smee is now a hot jacked guy, the crocodile is a big Romanian gangster. But I think we can basically get on board with the premise.  But the book, by rising star Jack Holden, is at best negligible, a flimsy account of the various characters working through their unresolved romantic pains and ongoing refusal to grow up. It just about does the trick but it...