Play-fighting and the agony of real warfare
Peter Pan
Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park
‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.” These words aren’t actually spoken aloud in JM Barrie’s Edwardian-era tale of a gravity-defying, age-resistant boy who’ll undertake any danger so long as it doesn’t involve being harnessed to adult conventionality. They’re described as a drumbeat of instinct pulsing within Peter Pan as he stands on wave-encircled Marooners’ Rock.
How many young men marched off to the Western Front with that succinct expression of heroic excitement? After the Great War, JM Barrie mourned what became of the happy Llewelyn Davies boys he had recruited to his would-be carefree imaginative cause – the eldest, George, shot dead by a sniper at Ypres, Peter invalided out, all affected. But the Pan phenomenon itself – and his own work for the War Propaganda Bureau – created a broader sense of culpability towards a generation of lost boys.
The genius of Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel’s reading of Peter Pan
– back at Regent’s Park after a loudly applauded run in 2015 – is that it cross-fertilises the innocence of the pre-war years with the horrors that followed. In so doing, it celebrates and obliquely critiques Barrie’s creation.
The familiar tale is relayed by a nurse (Cora Kirk, who will become Wendy) in a field hospital, a mock-up trench lined with the war-weary surrounding the stage. Theo Cowan (who becomes John Darling) has had the book tucked under his pillow, but everyone becomes enraptured to the point of re-enactment as the windows fly open to admit Pan (Sam Angell), bungee-diving and soaring like there’s no tomorrow.
Designers Jon Bausor (set), Jon Morrell (costumes) and Rachael Canning (puppetry) ensure that whether it’s mermaids with gas-masks for faces, a Neverland replete with poppies, or a tin helmet sitting snugly atop the chimney of Wendy’s ad hoc fashioned house, the ecstasy of archaic play-fighting foreshadows the agony of real warfare. There’s not a dud performance as the production, utilising nursery songs and wartime standards alike, soldiers onwards on two fronts, answering the need for an endorphin-rush of invention and swashbuckling zest alongside the tingle-factor of sadness and grief.
Though hardly weather-proof, this is a watertight family show that makes a vital contribution to our theatre’s too lacklustre 1914-18 centenary commemorative effort.
Until June 15. Tickets: 0844 871 2118; openairtheatre.com