Just like flying Peter Pan, your heart will soar
UNdER the summer evening sky, to the backdrop of wind rustled trees, actor Sam Angell lives up to his surname in this revived Regent’s park production of peter pan.
Mr Angell plays the eternally young peter and he gets to do some of the best stage flying i have seen. He really does seem to have wings.
Maybe it is the skill with which the pulleys and wires are operated or maybe it is Mr Angell’s gymnastic artistry — or maybe it is simply the liberation of open-air theatre, with its distinctive freshness and unpredictability.
is it going to rain? is a passing jetliner going to drown out the lines? Alfresco theatre has an edginess all of its own.
J. M. barrie’s venerable nursery escapism tale pre-dated World War i by at least a decade, but it has always been open to adaptation. This production firmly establishes a link with the misery of the Western Front. it opens in a wartime hospital ward and we soon see that its wounded soldiers are barrie’s ‘lost boys’ (as he called his gang of youngsters).
BARRiE described the lost boys as children who ‘ fall out of their prams when the nurse is looking the other way and if they are not claimed in seven days they are sent away to the Neverland’.
The idea that we, as a country, neglected those lads who fought at the Somme and elsewhere has an immediate force — one i found rather moving.
The tone is far from glum, though. A wounded, one-armed officer who patrols the ward becomes captain Hook as soon as the story is swept away into make-believe. dennis Herdman plays Hook with a glinting keenness that reminded me of Tim Mcinnerny’s captain darling in the blackadder Goes Forth TV comedy series. Terrific stuff from Mr Herdman.
The crocodile is created by a line of soldiers carrying various bits of metal, its jaws being a stepladder. The moment when Hook meets his maker is done with a comical
coup de theatre — topped with a crocodile burp. directors Timothy Sheader and liam Steel do not give us much softness in the staging. There is a lot of metallic jaggedness in the set.
No shortage of inventiveness, though. The military hospital’s beds are turned on their ends to create a Wendy house. Talking of which, cora kirk is delightful as Wendy, even if her accent goes a bit eeh-bah-gum at moments.
if the memory of those Great War soldiers lingers, this only accentuates the playfulness and innocence of barrie’s tale.
i could have done without a couple of modern minority politics gripes — how clunkingly inevitable such sermonising has become — but they cannot spoil an evening which will entrance families, not least for the haunting singing of Rebecca Thorn.
The moment of Tinker bell’s peril arrived and we were urged to clap to show Tink that we believed in fairies, for that would save her life. A little girl near me, well before anyone else, cried out with heartbreaking urgency: ‘i believe in fairies!’
She said it with rare defiance. She was completely caught up in the story. Really, that is all that needs be said.