Peter Pan Goes Wrong - Mischief Theatre

Laughter is a funny thing. (Pun intended). I can spend all day laughing at little things – but go into a theatre to watch something that’s designed to make people laugh and my laughter becomes something different. Suddenly it’s a reward I can choose to bestow or not. It’s an effort. It’s something that has to be cajoled out of me.

Or at least, that’s how it felt while watching Mischief Theatre’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne, on 24^th March 2015.

People around me were in hysterics. I found some bits quite amusing. I suppose it’s all personal taste.

This play comes from the same people as The Play that Goes Wrong, which by all accounts is very funny indeed. So I went into Peter Pan Goes Wrong ready and expecting to be entertained.

The conceit of the play is that a small amateur dramatics society is putting on a Christmas production of Peter Pan. For me – while they squeezed the mileage out of the am dram bit – they could have made more of the Peter Pan bit.

The original Peter Pan (without anything going wrong) is a playful, mischievous text. It’s full of knowing winks to the audience and doesn’t shy away from the fact that it creates an imaginary world where fantastical, ridiculous things happen. I can’t help but feel that if Mischief Theatre could have found a way to tease this out in Peter Pan Goes Wrong then they would have had a much funnier play on their hands.

But they weren’t really interested in Peter Pan. Their main focus was the am dram aspect of it all, which they played well. They were completely committed to the world they created for the amateur theatre company.

The programme on sale had biographies for the characters within the play who were the cast of Peter Pan. There were fake adverts in the programme which related to the world of the play. In the interval, Christmas music was played – as Peter Pan was supposed to be the amateur company’s Christmas production.

We, the audience, were very much cast as the audience at the amateur company’s performance. When the cast addressed us as the audience, they were in character as the amateur actors addressing their own local audience. They played it straight in this respect.

There was no suggestion of the third layer – that we were an audience at the Devonshire Park Theatre watching a professional company pretending to be amateurs. There was no knowing wink to the audience, nor any acknowledgement that they were creating an imaginary world where ridiculous things happen.

Any why should there be? Judging by the laughter around me, this wasn’t a problem for most of the audience. But I found it a tricky position to be in. I was being asked to suspend my disbelief – and yet I was also being asked to laugh. If I really did buy into the world of the play, then the evening was not funny but painful. Lord knows I’ve seen enough not-very-good amateur productions in my time.

Despite these reservations, there were moments that made me laugh out loud. And there were moments that I recognised with amusement from real productions I’d seen. I just felt that it could have been much funnier if only Mischief Theatre’s writing and direction had been a little more mischievous.

Farinelli and the King - Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare's Globe

I went to see the last performance of Farinelli and the King at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on Sunday 8^th March 2015, and I haven’t had much time to write about it since. So sorry this is rather short!

This was a strange, sad little play – both humorous and melancholy. Musing on the relationship between dreams and reality, madness and reason, the physical and the metaphysical, the court and the forest, private and public.

The dual casting of Farinelli – singer (William Purefoy) and actor (Sam Crane) playing the same role – only heightened this sense of duality. The voice as separate from the man.

And surely the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is the ideal setting for this play. Close, candlelit, intimate, but with obscured sightlines meaning you could only ever see part of the action. A wonderful acoustic, too – important for the music.

It was my first visit to the Globe’s indoor theatre and it felt a little strange coming to the Globe and not worrying about the weather. It’s another magical space, though. And it’s always a pleasure to see Mark Rylance do his thing. Especially here.