Peter and Alice - Michael Grandage Company

When you go to see a play that stars Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw, you’re ready for the acting to be pretty damn good. When the play is about Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, and you’ve studied children’s literature at university, you’re aware that the subject matter has the potential to be very compelling indeed.

So this was the position I was in when I went to see Peter and Alice by the Michael Grandage Company at the Noël Coward Theatre on 27^th April. I did not come away feeling disappointed.

This was a play about stories and truth; about memory and fantasy and reality; about childhood and adulthood and what ‘growing up’ means. (This last happens to be what my university dissertation was about. I think the playwright must have read some of the same books as me for research – particularly Jacqueline Rose’s influential The Case of Peter Pan, and possibly works by writers such as James R. Kincaid and Peter Coveney as well).

Early in the play, the real-life prototype for Alice (Judi Dench’s character Alice Liddell Hargreaves) speaks about people’s reaction on meeting her. She talks about the associations that they bring with them, and how meeting her causes them to remember how they were when they first read the book as children. The play itself, of course, does not escape such associations. Many of us these days know Peter and Alice through the filter of Disney; we think we know about J M Barrie because we’ve seen Johnny Depp play him in Finding Neverland.

Above all, we know Peter Pan and Alice as characters. When these fictional characters turn up on stage, they need no introduction. And it seems entirely appropriate that they are the final two on stage, after their real-life counterparts have departed.

Amongst our group, there was some discussion about whether the final two lines of the play, detailing how Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies died, were necessary. Hadn’t their contrasting endings been made apparent already? Did the facts of ‘real’ life need to be spelt out, when the ‘fiction’ played out before us had implicitly showed us the truth?

The play was thought-provoking, and we all seemed to take different things away from it. An anti-war message, a celebration of childhood imagination, a sense of melancholy and grief. And especially watching this so soon after the excellent Broadchurch finished – how could we categorise the authors’ relationships with children? Could we? Should we?

I’ll just finish with a little anecdote, which reflects beautifully on the differences between childhood and adulthood, fantasy and reality, as explored in the play.

The day after we went to see Peter and Alice, some of us were talking to a 5 year old child of our acquaintance. The little girl loves Peter Pan and often plays at being Wendy. A few days previously, one of the grown-ups in our group had come across the child dressed up and holding a hook. The grown-up wondered where the 5 year old had found such an item, and, as we were all gathered together now, asked her:

“Where did you get that hook the other day?”

The 5 year old, as if the answer was patently obvious, replied:

“From Captain Hook!”