Pa02Dec12c Peter Pan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4564988,00.html
Lyn Gardner Wednesday December 11, 2002 The Guardian
Every year for almost a century, around this time in December, normally careful parents - the kind who wouldn't dream of letting their children walk alone to the shop or see a scary video - do something extraordinary. They take their children to see a play that is brilliant but one of the most darkly disturbing ever written. It is the story of a strange, dysfunctional boy who refuses to grow up, who hangs around at a nursery window and lures its children away to a place where they meet a fairy who has the morals and murderous impulses of Lucrezia Borgia, and do battle with a wicked pirate who is both a distorted father figure and a walking, talking phallic symbol. It pops the idea into young, suggestible heads that "to die will be an awfully big adventure".
The story is, of course, Peter Pan and, like other great examples of Victorian and Edwardian wonderland literature, it was written by a man whose relationship with children was at best suspect. There is no evidence that J.M. Barrie ever acted on any of his impulses and most contemporary reports describe him as distinctly asexual, but his predilection for hanging around Kensington Gardens making friends with small children would today set alarm bells ringing and send social workers running to take protective action.
Peter Pan is undoubtedly one of the greatest plays of the past century. Even Peter Llewellyn Davies, the second son of the young family of five boys that Barrie befriended, and a man with more cause than most to loathe Peter Pan, called it "that terrible masterpiece". Llewellyn Davies was teased and haunted all his life for being the original model for Peter Pan; at the age of 63, he threw himself under a train at London's Sloane Square station.
Although it seems unimaginable now, the tale of Peter Pan didn't begin as a narrative for children. The character first appears in Barrie's 1902 novel for adults, The Little White Bird, an account of the interest taken in a small boy called David by a wealthy childless writer, who takes the child for walks in Kensington Gardens and tells him stories about a character called Peter Pan. David was the name of Barrie's elder brother, who died in a skating accident aged 13 and so became trapped in eternal youth. Barrie tried hard to replace David in his devastated mother's affections, even going as far as wearing his dead brother's clothes.
Even more creepily, The Little White Bird is a thinly disguised piece of wish-fulfilment, in which Barrie works through his relationship with the eldest Llewellyn Davies child, George. There is an undressing, bath and bedtime sequence that today we would recognise as having all the hallmarks of a paedophilic sexual fantasy.
"At half past six I turned on the hot water in the bath and covertly swallowed a small glass of brandy. I then said, 'Half past six, time for little boys to be in bed.' I said it in a matter-of-fact voice, as if there was nothing particularly delicious in hearing myself say it."
Yet Edwardian readers saw nothing askew in The Little White Bird, just as they were not alarmed by Robert Baden-Powell's delight in young men's bodies and desire to set up a scouting movement. Baden-Powell was obsessed by Barrie's stage play of Peter Pan, which premiered in 1904, and saw it many times. As did many adults, who made up the bulk of the play's original audience. In her excellent book Inventing Wonderland, the critic Jackie Wullschlager writes of grown men cheering as Peter Pan declares: "I want always to be a little boy and always have fun." Well, don't they still?
In a sense, the play groomed an entire generation to go willingly to the slaughter in the first world war. "We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen," says Wendy, as the lost boys seem certain to be made to walk the plank. Ten years after the premiere, they did indeed start dying like English gentlemen on the fields of Flanders. George Llewellyn Davies was among the dead, yet another golden youth embalmed in time. Unlike Captain Hook he would now never have time snapping at his heels. But while it is easy to explain the appeal of Peter Pan to the Edwardians and post-first world war generation, who could see in the play an elegiac spectacle of endless summer days spent playing pirates and Indians, it is harder to explain its appeal to our own era, one fraught with stranger danger and anxiety about paedophiles. This is something Jonathan Church recognises. He is now directing a production of Peter Pan at Birmingham Rep, and says some rehearsal time was spent questioning the Darling parents' decision to go out to a party and leave the children protected only by the dog Nana, who is tied up in the kennel. "We decided they probably are careless, but no more than most," says Church.
Perhaps, though, Peter Pan endures because of the central figure of Peter himself, the boy who refuses to grow up. He made Edwardian men cheer, but in an age where youth is prized, adolescence officially lasts until the age of 35, children grow up but refuse to leave home, and regular botox injections and plastic surgery can leave you with a face as smooth as a baby's, the notion of eternal youth now appeals to both sexes. Yet that is an appalling idea. At best, a child who never grows up is - like David Barrie or the fourth Llewellyn Davies child, Michael, who drowned aged 21 in what was believed to be a suicide pact with his best friend - a dead child. At worst, he or she is frozen, unable to achieve independence and lose either their sexual or emotional virginity. "No one must ever touch me," declares Peter, surely one of the most tragic statements in the whole of English drama. Adults often respond to Peter Pan as being about their own loss of innocence, when in fact it is about its deliberate retention. That is infinitely more twisted and sad.
Tony Graham, artistic director of the Unicorn Theatre for Children, argues that Peter is seriously disturbed, and shows all the signs of a child who has not been nurtured and has been starved of love. "Pan is not just unhappy, he is deeply miserable," he says. "Flying is the external manifestation of what he cannot achieve: mature sexuality." Graham, who hopes to stage "this wonderful, impossible problem play" when the new purpose-built Unicorn theatre opens in 2004, argues that adults tend to have an affection for Peter Pan that blinds them to the terrible truths at the story's heart.
"I find it interesting that adults are so nostalgic about a story that is about how wretched and miserable a lot of growing up is. That nostalgia is based on an entirely false notion of what the nursery is," says Graham. He thinks that the refusal to confront the pain and darkness at the heart of Peter Pan is one of the reasons we still see so many bowdlerised versions of the story.
If we are ever really going to grow up, it seems crucial that we should confront the play's dark core, and deal with its disturbing psychological suggestiveness in a truly adult manner. We should stop wrapping it in a hazy gauze of nostalgia and acknowledge that Peter Pan is not just a work of genius, but a work of genuine horror.
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002