Lost boys

In Beryl Bainbridge’s novel An Awfully Big Adventure the producer Meredith Potter issues a doughty injunction on the subject of staging Peter Pan: ‘I am not qualified to judge whether the grief his mother felt on the death of his elder brother had an adverse effect on Mr Barrie’s emotional development, nor do I care one way or the other. We all have our crosses to bear. Sufficient to say that I regard the play as pure make-believe. I don’t want any truck with symbolic interpretations.’ Symbolic interpretation hangs heavily over the rough-and-tumble jumble of Janacek, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Satie, Handel, Vivaldi, sea shanties and klezmer in Lavinia Greenlaw and Richard Ayres’s half-brilliant, half-bewildering operatic adaptation for Welsh National Opera. Alongside the raucous crowing of children liberated from adult rules (‘Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!’) and deprived of adult protection, the creak of a saw, the wheeze of an accordion, the chime of a celesta and the ticking of the crocodile is a terrible, inconsolable grief. But whose grief is it?

Blink at the wrong time and you’ll miss the key. There amid the alphabet blocks that spell out N.E.V.E.R.L.A.N.D. at the close of Act I in Jason Southgate’s Victorian nursery design is a London underground roundel: Sloane Square. This is the station where Peter Llewellyn Davies, one of five brothers whom tiny, mother-fixated J.M. Barrie befriended, threw himself in front of a train in 1960. Sorrow and rage are present in all of Barrie’s Peter Pan stories, especially in the novel Peter and Wendy (1911), but in Keith Warner’s production the footnotes overwhelm the text. Trains are everywhere, taking Mr Darling (Ashley Holland) to work and defining him as ‘a father who leaves the house at the same time as every other father’, circling through the nursery and propelling the pirate ship commanded by Captain Hook (Holland again).