Peter and Alice

Inspired writer, John Logan. His 2009 play, Red, delved brilliantly into the gloom-ridden, suicidal mind of the misanthropic modernist painter Mark Rothko. The play’s unflinching and sordid honesty earned the author, and his director Michael Grandage, a bagful of gongs on either side of the Atlantic.

The pair have reunited for Logan’s new play, Peter and Alice, which opens with a meeting between Alice Liddell (of Wonderland fame) and Peter Llewellyn Davies, who inspired J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Alice and Peter, now grown up, compare notes about the books they featured in, about the writers who used them as models, about childhood, about adulthood, about this, about that. The writers themselves wander on stage and add to the floaty mood of inconsequential nostaglia.

When Logan studied Rothko he had a blisteringly intense focus. Here he grapples with two writers, two real children, two fictional counterparts, and two children grown into maturity. And he’s overcome by reverential awe for his material. The chief conversations are as mannered and superficial as a greetings card. And the scenes featuring J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll feel like a tribute act performed by wind-up zombies. Logan’s problem is that there’s nothing at stake for any of the characters and no one has any dramatic goal to fulfil.

The first half has one identifiable gag. Alice (Judi Dench) remembers seeing the diminutive J.M. Barrie at a party. ‘Famous people should not be so tiny, it seems dishonest,’ she says, giving the line a good crack of Lady Bracknell’s whip. But the rest of the play is crammed with bombastic platitudes. ‘For we are a family defined by our sadness,’ says the grown-up Peter, as if drafting an inscription for his grandmother’s mausoleum. ‘Do you know what it is to be 80 years old and sick and alone?’ replies Alice.