Peter Pan and Other Plays: The Admirable Crichton - Peter Pan - When Wendy Grew Up - What Every Woman Knows - Mary Rose Book

The Admirable Crichton

What if Lord of the Flies happened, except everyone is adult and civilised? Of course, this was written decades before William Golding's only good book and Barrie's aims were more by way of social satire via comedy of manners than getting in-yer-face with the underlying brutal savagery of human nature, papered over by civilisation. Which in turn was JG Ballard's favourite theme, though he probably never quite succeeded so spectacularly.

But back to Barrie: You can rip through this in no time and be gently amused but it's about an alien world for most of us - hardly anybody has even one live in servant any more of course, let alone an entire staff of hierarchically minded people presided over by a Butler who keeps everyone rigidly in their places. Probably why it's nowhere near as famous as a play about a boy who never grew up - because we all had a childhood, whenever or wherever we lived.

Peter Pan & When Wendy Grew Up

The Boy Who Never Grew Up: Tragic figure or victorius immortal? You decide. A clever, witty meditation on childhood, imagination and growing up, appreciable in contrasting ways by the young and the old in the audience. A challenge to stage, even now, I suspect, and an acting challenge for the cast, too, I would guess. Delightful, bitter-sweet and perhaps made more so by the addition of the short When Wendy Grew Up, often staged as a coda to the action of Peter Pan.

What Every Woman Knows

I don't really want to spoil the plot of this play at all. It's about a plain-looking woman who is under-estimated by everybody, written when the women's suffrage movement was under way but not yet successful and published first in the year 1918 - when women first got the vote in Britain. It's depressing how relevant this play is a century later.

I found it delightful - far better than either The Admirable Crichton or Peter Pan (and I liked both of those). Gentle comedy based on a preposterous initial incident leads to an examination of gender roles and questions particularly, what men value as compared to what they perhaps should.

Mary Rose

What an odd little play! Themes of magic, islands and suspended aging re-appear but the brevity leads to thin characterisation, thus making it less moving than perhaps it should be.