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.

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!”