So there are two halves to Peter Pan. There is Peter and there his Pan.
Peter can partly be put down to Peter Llewelyn Davies who is one of the boys
that J. M Barrie befriended in Kensington Gardens and then started telling the
stories about. At the time he was only a baby, so it was kind of a joke. This baby
would suddenly become this sort of mischievous wisecracking hero Pizza was
also perhaps Peter the wild boy this kind of memory of an almost legendary
but actually real figure from the start of the 18th century who had been found
living wild as a child and then brought to the attention of the gentry but even
as a grownup seemed still to be living in a kind of innocence or savage state
but then Paran is perhaps the more interesting bit of the story because pan
goes back to the figure of classical legends but instead of the pan that we
might be familiar with who has a cloven feet and shaggy hindquarters the pan he
became successful towards the end of the century in stories by by sake and in a
bit of The Wind in the Willows and loads of other places is a kind of more
youthful and playful figure so in some ways when Barry puts Peter next to pan
what he's doing is picking up on a popular cultural idea of the time and
then giving it his own particular kind of tweak which is to make it a Peter Pan
to mine
barri was a real tinkerer and he wrote a character called Tinkerbell
he himself was a real tinkerer when it came to his own stories pizza pan he
first of all rights as a he's a sort of story within a story in a larger book or
the little white bird and then he starts to expand it into a play and one of the
things which this edition does is reprint the original draft of which only
one version exists a handwritten manuscript in which Tinkerbell is called
tippy-toe most of the other characters are still there as we know them but the
last act is entirely different it's a genuine pantomime involving Harlequins
and columbines and a crocodile rearing up out of a
serpentine to the snatch hook and eat him up but then after he wrote the play
in in nineteen eighty four to five Barrie kept on fiddling with it he kept
revising it year after year some lines he took out some lines he put in for
instance the line about fairy dust he put in when children apparently were
throwing themselves off their beds to try to fly and there were complaints so
he needs to put that in but he didn't publish the plane till 1928 because like
a lot of pantomimes he he loved the idea of it sounding
up-to-date for the few topical references and jokes
see who'd fiddle with this every year but at the same time he wrote a prose
adaptation of a story called Peter and Wendy
he also wrote different versions of a film a silent film script a lot of film
was never written again it's something that was nagging away at him for years
so all these different versions suggest that although Peter Pan the character
didn't grow up Peter Pan the book in a sense did it got kind of bigger and more
complicated as the years went by
I suppose one of the interesting things about Peter Pan is that although Peter
Pan doesn't grow up as a character Peter Pan the idea has has gone in all sorts
of different directions you see it in everything from merchandize to a
Scandinavian car ferry that was called Peter Pan to of course more recently
Michael Jackson who is called the Peter Pan of pop and lived in the Netherlands
but you also see adaptations of the original story both straight adaptations
like the Disney cartoon but also strange adaptations like et in et the story
which the bit of a story where Tinker Bell
seems to be dying and is then brought back to life he's read by the mother to
her daughter just before ET himself is brought back
to life by the other children so you start seeing these strange ways in which
the story has been kind of manipulated and played with over the years
why well perhaps because it is one of those stories which we grow up knowing
but we don't really know it because we don't know the story behind the story
and the more we get to know about it the more we realize just how strange it is
and Virginia Woolf said about another famous children's book Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland that these are the only stories she said not only
written for children but the only books in which we become children and I think
she was wrong because it's not just the Alice books it's also stories like Peter
Pan we grow up with them but when we return to them they remind us that we
might be able to imagine what it is to not grow up and so to fix our our
interest on a character who never grows up is to remind us that
a little bit of Peter Pan that you know remains inside all of us
so there are two people to thank for Peter Pan the stage play one of course
is Jaron Barry the other one is the producer Charles Frohman who believed in
Barry put up a huge amounts of money for this completely untried and untested
play took over the Duke of York's theatre which is a 900 seater spent huge
amounts of money on scenery and on a special new kind of fly harness for the
flying scenes paid for a new set of scenery when the first slot was largely
destroyed when mechanical lifts broke down paid for the heat that the
carpenters and all the stagehands to have hot they're Christmas off while
Barry rewrote the play when it finally opens several days lays is a huge
success and what the audience saw I suppose depended upon how much they knew
about Barry so those who knew Barry could see bits of the family he'd more
or less adopted the Llewellyn Davis family their nursery their kind of
numerical relationship their children even Barry's own dog who becomes Nanna
in in the play but if you didn't know anything about Barry
what you saw was like a children's kind of story which has suddenly come to life
in front of you so for the first night the mostly adult audience were
absolutely transported not just to Neverland but back to their own
childhoods Barry of course was terrified that the climactic scene which involves
Tinker Bell coming back to life through the applause of the audience would be a
bit of a squib because he was worried that the audience would be you know
you know looking at their face and sort of shuffling rather nervously and so he
asked the orchestra if no one else applauded to put down their instruments
and you know applaud in the end eating me to worry standing ovations all
round it got a huge critical reception and then it came back year after year
after year some of the same actors also came back year after year the saddest
bit of the whole production though is of course when the children got too big and
they were measured every year at that stage they had to stop being in the play
and they replaced like Billy Elliot today and so that's the point at which
they realized that the Lost Boys aren't only losts because they've moved away
from their parents it's like a little warning about the greatest loss that any
boy can suffer which is childhood itself and of course Peter Pan as the name
would suggest it's almost like a pun it starts off as a pan to mime and the
earliest version which is reprinted in the book is much more explicitly a
pantomime and involved lots of the same elements and even now if you look at a
production of Peter Pan the crocodile that appears which is itself a joke
because it swallowed a clock so it's a krokodil di al that's one of the
crocodile di le the crocodile was originally played by two actors so it's
like a savage pantomime horse so you've got the pantomime horse you got the
pantomime Dame and I suppose the other big relationship with pantomime is this
idea of the transformation scene so Victorian pantomimes would often climax
with a grand transformation in which for instance Cinderella's pumpkin would
become the coach usually with lots of kind of wooden
flaps kind of banging around the transformation in Peter Pan is not just
that the stage becomes netherland yes it becomes this other world where anything
can happen a world of the imagination at play it's also the notion that childhood
is a state that you can enter and re-enter whenever you want to as if the
state of play isn't just what happens in a theatre it's of course what children
do all the time so it's a way of bringing together the world of childhood
and the world of theater squashing him together into the most popular
theatrical form which of course is one for all the family
although in this case one has been stripped of the rude jokes and chucking
sweets of the audience and the bouncing born with the the song lyrics
Barry himself never grew taller than 5 feet and towards the end of his life he
wrote down in one of his notebooks that he suddenly realized what Peter Pan was
all about which was the desire to grow up but not being able to but in some
ways anyone who Reds his work knew that because almost all his work is about
both the pleasures and the dangers of not growing up and in some ways you can
trace that back to his own childhood so his own brother dies on the eve of his
14th birthday in a skating accident Barry's mother their mother is broken by
grief and Barry decides to become as much like his dead brother as he can by
acting in order to try and cheer his mother up in some ways much of the rest
of his life is like a set of variations on that same primal scene he acts and
encourages others to enjoy acting as a way of avoiding growing up and enjoying
being someone else one of the reasons why he loved writing plays like Peter
Pan was it allowed you to be other people without having to commit to
changing yourself and in some ways Peter Pan was the the most extraordinary
incarnation of that idea because this allows a grown-up actress to imagine
being a small boy and never get any older night after night after night as
if somehow theatre could allow you to pass your time but could also freeze
time barrier being hugely successful playwright before Peter Pan and in fact
one of the plays which he wrote just before Peter Pan you can see Ken
hovering somewhere in the background of Peter Pan itself and that's the
admirable Crichton the admirable Crichton is about a butler who along
with his employers get shipwrecked on an island and what happens is that all the
other adults revert to a kind of strange childhood state
they start playing around they squabble they sulk
they dress up in animal skins they play with bows and arrows it's the butler who
takes charge so the natural hierarchy is reasserted and then when they're rescued
they go back to things as they are Peter Pan kind of plays a variation on bats
because of course often it's grown-ups playing children like an adult actress
playing Peter Pan and it's on an island and it's a world of play but tangled up
with the world of pantomime means that it's a much more kind of playful kind of
play so you can see early bits of Peter Pan in his earlier work and then later
on he wrote another play about going to an island where in the blink an eye you
can either age or you can stay the same age forever so again you see these kind
of aftershocks of Peter Pan I mean it's in his later writing but then the key
thing is I suppose that because he didn't publish the play until 1928
so more than two decades after its first put on the stage that is a play which is
forever rewriting you know it is something that
he still has this reliving relationship boy and that is something I was trying
to get across in this new edition this idea that Peter Pan isn't just as a
cultural presence something which kind of goes on and on and on for Barry
himself is something that kept on branching in new directions and taking
on new forms
I don't think he could ever be finished with Peter Pan because the the real
children he wrote the story for of the Llewellyn Davis boys of course grew up
and they moved away and sadly a number of them died one in the trenches of the
First World War one two round possibly a suicide another
one after Berry's own death threw himself in front of an underground
train pizza in fact though the original Peter Pan died in Sloane Square
underground station but of course Peter Pan the literary character was the
little boy who would never grow up I would never leave him and that's one of
the reasons why I think he needed to to go back again and again to this story to
refresh it so to remind himself of his connection to it there's actually that
there's a lovely story of his his secretary Cynthia Asquith quite late in
life going to his flat and seeing Barry blowing on a fire and trying to spark it
back into life and in some ways that's a sort of metaphor for his relationship
with Peter Pan they know year after year he wanted to to kind of bring it back to
life
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