Review: Wendy & Peter Pan

The classic fairy tale flies higher than ever in a blockbuster Barbican production of Ella Hickson’s storied J.M. Barrie adaptation

Is the RSC putting on a pantomime this year? Oh no it isn’t! But it sort of is… Staging a handsome, spectacular adaptation of Ella Hickson’s dark, feminist Peter Pan reboot, director Jonathan Munby skilfully walks the line between fairy dust and family trauma. Come for the swashed buckles and Cirque-style flying set pieces; stay for a story that makes J.M. Barrie’s original feel richer and more emotional than ever.

Putting Wendy’s name first in the title isn’t the only welcome change (it is, after all, her story – Alice In Wonderland isn’t called “The Mad Hatter”…) as the play starts with a gut punch that grounds the whole adventure. Mr and Mrs Darling (Toby Stevens and Lolita Chakrabarti) are mourning the death of their son, Tom. It’s an upspoken tragedy that threatens to drive a rift between them both, and between their other children, Wendy (Hannah Saxby), John (Fred Woodley Evans) and Michael (Kwaku Mills).

Wendy, especially, is struggling to cope, and it’s here that her fantasy begins. Whisked off to Neverland by the flying sprite Peter Pan (Daniel Krikler) to mother the “Lost Boys”, fight pirates and face the dastardly Captain Hook – Stevens switching from broken father to preening ham in the play’s meatiest role, as Saxby and Krikler spar and soar around him.

Colin Richmond and Lucy Hind deserve a starring credit though for their gorgeous set design and choreography – with balletic wirework helping the cast fly around a Barbican that’s elegantly transformed into a picture book Victorian nursery, jungle and pirate ship.

This is, after all, still the same Peter Pan that’ll be doing the end-of-pier rounds this Christmas – with a brilliantly brassy Tinkerbell (Charlotte Mills, channelling Kathy Burke) getting magicked back to life by the children in the audience; Hook ribbing Peter about Wendy “sliding into his DMs”; and a dance finale that ends with confetti canons. But at the same time the air of existential dread hangs heavy here – Wendy shocked by grief; Peter stuck in arrested development; Hook unable to reconcile his own lost youth. When the “crocodile” shows up as the same doctor who couldn’t save the real Tom, the same stopwatch hanging from his mouth that he used to pronounce the time of death, the play delivers its most affecting metaphor – and its boldest leap between the worlds of fantasy and realism.

It’s a mix as beautifully conflicted as the book (“to die will be an awfully big adventure”), and a balance that perfectly fits the staging of the new production. Part splashy kids comedy, part emotional adult drama, this is a grown-up panto. A panto, that is, that finds the idea of growing up just a little bit devastating.

Wendy & Peter Pan | Meet the Cast