Noël Coward Theatre, until
1 June 2013
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Childhood disintegrates until it has become nothing more
than the forgotten dust in the corner of a long-abandoned toy box. This is the unexpectedly bleak message
of Peter and Alice, writer John Logan’s
(Skyfall) imagined exposition of the
real-life encounter between Peter Llewellyn Davies, the man who inspired JM
Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. As Peter,
Ben Whishaw resembles a dilapidated, emaciated teddy bear, becoming visibly
more broken by the memories of his painful childhood and adulthood encounters with
death. Judi Dench’s elderly Alice Liddell is more a rocking horse: haughty, ornate
and rigid with disuse, but becoming stiffly animated when thoughts of play and
childhood innocence occur to her again.
It is worth watching this play for their portrayals alone. From the first
bristling moment of encounter, Alice and Peter are fully-formed, intensely
complex characters with a sparring dynamism worthy of Tweedledum and
Tweedledee. Whishaw and Dench bring to their parts a gravity, warmth and poignancy
that makes every one of their words fly up with Peter Pan to the soaring joys
of childhood or burrow down a much less fantastical rabbit hole than the
fictional Alice enjoys, fathoming the real depths of despair and suffering.
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Logan is not afraid to explore these depths – his characters’
torments come from their exposure at a young age to complicated, confused older
men who revered, to the point of problematic rapture, the innocence of youth.
Both Barrie and Liddell here reveal disillusionment with ‘that place adulthood’
that ultimately scars the adults into which their children turn. The real Peter
and Alice remain trapped in Lewis Carroll’s metaphorical darkroom, never to let
in the light for fear of ruining the suspended moment of the photo which
captures irretrievable youth. And you leave the play feeling this entrapment so
intensely it is hard not to crave halcyon childhood abandoment, only to realise that
being trapped in Never Never Land is, as Logan suggests, just as bad.
The shortcomings of the play are the script and plot devices
– Peter and Alice didn’t have the extensive workshopping most new writing would usually undergo before a West End debut, which seems to be to
its detriment. Logan’s writing is heavy with metaphor – sometimes it is
flightily poetic, but at others it feels distinctly laboured. Similarly, the
devices of flashback to scenes with Barrie and Carroll (brilliantly played by Derek
Riddell and Nicholas Farrell respectively) and slightly contrived manifestations
of the fictional Peter Pan and Alice confuse the plot and disperse any
narrative drive.
Despite this, I left the theatre feeling edified and challenged
– although part of this challenge was to remember that life is not as desolate as
this play forces you to feel. When Peter says ‘I know what childhood’s for. It’s
to give us a bank of happy memories against future suffering’, you hope your
own life has given you a bank worthy of Mary Poppins’s levitating bankers. The
same may not be able to be said of the real Peter and Alice, but Whishaw and
Dench bring them to life with such force that you cannot but be swept along
your corridor of tears in this confounding, capricious, captivating wonderland.
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