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JM Barrie’s original 1904 play ‘Peter Pan’ feels like a pretty twee period piece these days; you can understand director Jonathan O’Boyle’s urge to update it. But while this production is set in 2018 – Mr Darling has an iPhone; Peter wears Converse – the approach to updating the script is so half-hearted it really leaves the show floundering.
We might think of ‘Peter Pan’ as a charming children’s story, but it packs in a lot of insidious old-fashioned lessons about what girls and boys, women and men, are like and how they relate to each other. Girls like mermaids; boys like pirates. Girls are teary and scared; boys are strong and brave. Women do all the emotional labour; their husbands are overgrown man-babies (it’s Mr Darling who really appears to be the boy who never grew up).
But much of this just doesn’t sit well in the mouths of contemporary kids. And while O’Boyle introduces occasional splashes of 2018 idiom – Peter Pan coming out with ‘oh my days’ or calling people ‘mate’ – it just further highlights the outdated stuff. I couldn’t help but snigger when the Darling children refuse to become pirates because they are loyal subjects of the Queen, promising to ‘die like English gentlemen’… What eight-year-old would say that? Why not just do a proper re-write?
There’s also a weird tension in Barrie’s play between motherliness, sexuality and childhood, which is a lot to be plonked on little Wendy. O’Boyle takes all this into even dodgier territory by staging the moment when she sews Peter’s shadow back on his feet as an extended sex joke about 69ing, presumably for the parents, none of whom laugh.
With a cast of only eight and a smallish stage, this isn’t the flashiest ‘Peter Pan’ you’ll ever see. But Gregor Donnelly’s design effectively blurs the worlds of the nursery and Neverland, with green moss creeping over furniture, and finds some cute, inventive solutions for crocodiles, wendy houses and Nana the dog.
But O’Boyle’s pacing is strangely slow and sluggish, meaning this fantastical story doesn’t always fly. The grown-up cast do give game performances however, and Alexander Vlahos is great doubling as the over-dramatic, petulant Mr Darling and Captain Hook: rather than terrifying, he is amusingly camp, posturing, and completely ineffectual. Nickcolia King-N’da as Peter is appealing and has the right amount of attitude; sadly Rosemary Boyle’s Wendy comes across as shallow, and very wet, although this is, again, largely the fault of uncritical fidelity to the original script.