EDWARDIANA FOR A FEMINIST AGE
It looks wonderful. Designer Colin Richmond has been set loose, with Oliver Fenwick’s lighting, to create both the the raftered, big-windowed Edwardiana of the Darling’s house and the flickering Neverland splendour with its great fantastical tree, crazy-inventor furnishings and one of the great pirate ships of the genre. The latter has skeletal paws and teeth, and , vitally, plenty of scope for high level pirate athleticism. The sword fights are excellent too, with top ambidextrous work from Ami Tredrea’s Tiger Lily. The flying is ace, graceful and wild whether solo or in elegant groups, and the frock-coated crocodile – doubling as the family doctor with his loud-ticking watch – is a lovely touch. Actually more frightening in his slither than most panto-style crocs we have seen.
I begin all that with because you are going to take your (over 7) child or your inner child to the RSC’s pre-Christmas show, Ella Hickson’s “retelling” of JM Barrie’s beloved tale. Both will enjoy. My reservations are entirely adult ones: there is something wearingly deliberate in Hickson’s message, too much instruction into how to think – about girls’ place, about family, about grief. Her story is a darkened reframing of Barrie’s whimsy (though God knows Barrie himself was writing out of grief, personal and empathetic to bereaved child friends). Wendy is reframed too, as a bright girl unwilling to be “mother” to the Lost Boys or a scared, admiring “damsel”‘for them to rescue. She wants to be a fighter, and forms her own army out of Tiger Lily and Charlotte Mills’ entertainingly stroppy Cockney Tinkerbell.
The theme of grief is strong: we hear sung the haunting opening of Yeats’ “Come away o human child, to the water and the wild”, and Peter Pan’s first appearance, a year before Wendy and her brothers fly off with him, is basically as the angel of death. He appears by the bed of a third brother , Tom, who is dying of a fever. So Wendy has to look for him in Neverland, with precious little interest or assistance from Pan, Slightly, Curly and Tootles. Who are at times funny , but to an adult eye at times their capers and toddlerish remarks, played by young adult men, seem to teeter uncomfortably on a border between lovably inconsequential larking and diagnosable mental illness. Daniel Krikler’s vivid , yobbish Peter is not the least unsettling in his wriggling irresponsibility: he generally looks as if he’s on the way to graffiti a railway bridge. But that mood is all there in Barrie, who was fonder of boy-children than of boring mumsy old Wendy, so fair enough.
All this bothered me a bit in the first half, but the second is pacier, and Toby Stephens’ Hook is fabulous, a real treat. Not least because his withering sarcasm and envy of the leaping, larking young is so refreshingly adult. Scott Karim’s Smee, extreme camp, offering colour-swatches for the cottage with Hook he dreams of, is properly funny.
Rsc.org.uk. To 22 nov.
Rating 4
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