An Awfully Big Adventure
Peter Pan by J M Barrie
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1995
“Barrie has gone out of his mind… I am sorry to say it, but you ought to know it. He’s just read me a play. He is going to read it to you, so I am warning you.”
Herbert Beerbohm Tree to Charles Frohman, 1904
In one of the story’s many incarnations, Peter Pan remarks to Wendy that to die would be an awfully big adventure. The same could be said about the first production of J M Barrie’s most famous and commercially successful play. When he proposed the idea to his producer Charles Frohman. He was acutely aware that it could well prove the most extravagant and expensive flop in their respective and hitherto respectable theatrical careers. Luckily Frohman had more confidence than the author, and the rest, as they say, is history.
But the first night of Peter Pan on 27 December 1904 was only the most recent chapter in a story that had begun many years before. The idea of a boy who would not grow up had been part of Barrie’s psyche ever since his elder brother David has died on the eve of his fourteenth birthday, ever to remain that age to their inconsolable mother. In striving (fruitlessly) to replace him, Barrie himself had retained something of the child which throughout his life provided him with an almost uncanny ability to forge links with children on their own terms. They habitually responded to him, not as a grown-up, but as one of their own, and it was this which first drew the Llewelyn Davies boys to him and him to them. On his walks in Kensington Gardens with George and Jack, and later Peter, he first invented the tales that would one day combine and become the most famous fairy story of the twentieth century.
“Well, if that’s the sort of thing the public wants, I suppose we’ll have to give it ’em.”
George Edwardes, musical-comedy impresario
Peter Pan himself first appeared in a 1902 novel called The Little White Bird. Here, he is the central figure in just one of the stories an unnamed narrator tells to a boy called David he has befriended. Half baby, half bird, Peter Pan lives on the island in the Serpentine, plays he pipes at fairies’ balls, and, somewhat more grimly, digs graves for the babies who fall out of their prams in Kensington Gardens. Locked out from the ‘real’ world but constantly returning to it, this Peter is a potentially tragic figure, a quality that would frequently be overlooked in later, more sentimentalised versions. But the adults who read The Little White Bird were quick to fall under its spell; the Times Literary Supplement declared: “If a book exists which contains more knowledge and more love of children, we do not know it… Whimsical, sentimental, profound, ridiculous, utterly impossible yet absolutely real… To analyse its defects would be to vivisect a fairy.”
The following year, when Barrie began mapping out the stage version, it was still a play for adults, albeit ‘with’ children (all the Lost Boys would be played by mature actresses until 1928). But the fact that it contained every element known to delight the hearts of little boys everywhere was obviously another legacy from the Llewelyn Davies brothers. Adventure literature was enjoying a vogue under the influence of Henty, Marryat, Stevenson, Verne and in particular Ballantyne, whose Coral Island Barrie had known and loved since boyhood, and all their stock themes can be seen in the photographic record Barrie made of a summer trip he took with the boys in the summer of 1901. The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island shows them enjoying ‘for real’ adventures in wild forests and tree houses, and safely and successfully overcoming dangers from natives and fierce animals, the latter usually played by the author’s faithful Saint Bernard dog, Porthos. (It would be Porthos’s successor, the Newfoundland Luath, who would supply the inspiration for the Darlings’ anthropomorphic nurse Nana in Peter Pan.) The same holiday memoir also enshrines the first appearance of a dark and sinister pirate called Captain Swarthy…
“When Hook first paced his quarter-deck in the year 1904, children were carried screaming from the stalls… How he was hated, with his flourish, his poses, his dreaded diabolical smile! … There was no peace in those days until the monster was destroyed, and the fight upon the pirate ship was a fight to the death.”
Daphne du Maurier, Gerald, a Portrait
The play’s title when Barrie first presented it to Frohman was The Great White Father. That was the only thing about it the producer didn’t like, so after toying with Peter and Wendy, Barrie settled on Peter Pan. An over-fond posterity likes to imagine that it was the first pantomime, but this is not the case. Spectacular children’s entertainments had been attracting huge London audiences for over thirty years. Nor was it the first fairy play with special effects. But it was the first to draw together all the most extravagant elements of these and have the confidence and the imagination to use them in a serious, unpatronising way – for effect, rather than simply for show.
That there would ever be a show at all was frequently in doubt throughout the ten-week rehearsal period. Sixty stagehands sweated to ensure the scene changes would go smoothly (“The gallery boys won’t stand it,” a depressed man in overalls was heard to mutter at one point), and various technical problems combined to sap the company’s already dwindling morale. Hilda Trevelyan, the show’s Wendy, was alarmed to be told on the first morning of rehearsals that she could not start work until her life had been insured. This was due to the revolutionary nature of the aerial sequences. The existing apparatus for flying an actor on stage allowed only basic movement and the harness was so bulky it took several minutes to fit and remove. Barrie prevailed upon George Kirby and his Flying Ballet Company to come up with a new system that would not only allow more complex manoeuvres in the air, but could also be detached in seconds. (Kirby’s idea was an adaptation of the counterweight system connected through a series of drums to the actor. The counterweight made movements smoother than hauling a rope. Further ropes and pulleys allowed the actor to be flown in other directions.)
In addition, Barrie’s original intention of having the actress playing Tinkerbell visible behind a giant reducing lens proves impracticable, so he had to think again. On 21 December, the eve of the original opening, a stage lift collapsed destroying part of the scenery. Barrie spent that Christmas rewriting the ending for the fifth time, and when the curtain finally went up on 27 December, the author, no less than the director and the actors, was exhausted.
“Peter Pan all right, looks like a big success”
Telegram to Charles Frohman, 27 December 1904
But the reaction they received made it all worthwhile. When Nina Boucicault as Peter asked the audience to clap if they believed in fairies, a packed house of Edwardian gentlefolk responded so tumultuously that the actress burst into tears. “So true, so natural, so touching that it brought the audience to the writer’s feet and held them captive there,” reported the Daily Telegraph. “Peter Pan is from beginning to end a thing of pure delight,” said The Times. “Oh for an hour of Herod!” opined the writer Anthony Hope – but he was in a minority. It quickly became axiomatic that this was a show to be seen in the company of children as if their presence alone was the only mature way of legitimising an adult’s attendance. The American version, which opened in November 1905, was a similar triumph prompting Mark Twain to declare: “The next best thing is a long way behind it.”
Once the show’s success had been established, the Peter Pan merchandising machine moved into full swing. First onto the bandwagon were Barrie’s publishers Hodder & Stoughton. In 1906 they extracted the Peter Pan passages from The Little White Bird and, together with fifty illustrations by Arthur Rackham, republished them under the title Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The following year the Peter Pan Picture Book appeared, illustrated with images from the original production. In 1908 Pauline Chase, the actress who played Peter from 1906 to 1913, brought out Peter Pan’s Postbag, a collection of letters children had written to her. G D Drennan produced a narrative version of the play script in 1909, and imaginative biographies of the characters began to appear around the same time.
D O’Connor’s Peter Pan Keepsake in 1912 was a summary of the play which became accepted in schools as a reader, though it presented a bowdlerised edition of the text – for instance, such expressions as “weird apparition” were transmuted into the more mundane “strange figure”, and Hook’s “voracious saurian” tamely became a “greedy crocodile”. The original Peter was already fragmenting in the hands of audiences around the world who had claimed him as their own.
For some years Barrie himself resisted his publisher’s urgings to turn his “dream-child” into a book, only relenting in 1911 when, perhaps, he felt the story needed to be fixed to his own satisfaction. Peter and Wendy was his first and only attempt to write a narrative for children, but it is more than a simple retelling of what happened every Christmas on stage. It not only goes deeper than the play, but also further. The final chapter, When Wendy Grew Up, is a prose version of a final scene that was only ever performed once – Afterthought, or What Happened to Wendy ended the last night of the 1907–8 season. It introduced material that has only recently found favour again; in 1982 the RSC version was the first production to bring a male Peter on stage. This production also made an attempt to give the most ‘complete’ reading of the Peter Pan story so far, by restoring several traditional cuts, drawing on the Afterthought, and including many of the words spoken by the narrator of the 1911 Peter and Wendy book.
As an interesting sidelight, Barrie filled in Hook’s background in a piece called Jas Hook at Eton which he delivered as a lecture at the school in 1927. It was a late attempt on his part to rescue something of his original idea as, ironically, the spread of literacy had already had a detrimental effect on his most famous work. When Peter and Wendy was accepted as a school text in 1915, it had been shorn of any element that might alienate any section of its potential readership. Anything that smacked of a classical literary style had been removed, as had all cultural and material references to the characters’ backgrounds. The first ten pages of Barrie’s narrative were cut completely turning the narrator into an objective characterless voice, and the story starts, not with the famous statement “All children, except one, grow up”, but, prosaically, “The children were in bed…”
Barrie’s final word on the script was published in The Collected Plays of J M Barrie (1928), when he eventually brought out his own ‘definitive’ version of the text complete with fulsome stage directions (which almost make it read like a cross between a playscript and a novel), and a moving dedication which alone refutes all the cloying and colourless versions others had made of his story. In 1937, a week after Barrie’s death, an article in the Times Literary Supplement defended his reputation thus: “If Peter Pan is fashionable sentimentality, then the whole of Barrie’s theatre is refused its major claim. But if Peter Pan is in the succession of Cinderella, if it is not a Christmas pantomime but one of those stories that embody and perpetuate the intuitive wisdom of childlike humanity, then Barrie’s work will be in flower when all the ‘intellectual and social forces’ of our time, Ibsen, Strindberg or Shaw, have vanished even from the encyclopaedias.”
“A few years ago, one of our most popular authors, J M Barrie, wrote a sort of fairy play for children called Peter Pan which had such an enormous success that it has since been revived every Christmas, ostensibly as a holiday entertainment for children but really as a play for grown-up people; for, as you know, when we buy toys for children, we take care to select the ones which amuse ourselves.”
G B Shaw to August Strindberg, 1910
In the nine decades since the play opened, it has been transformed into every entertainment medium known to the modern world – stage musical, Disney cartoon (1953), live action motion picture, both silent and sound (a 1924 film, not starring Charlie Chaplin as Barrie hoped, ignored practically every detail of his scenario, while Steven Spielberg’s spectacular version with Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams appeared in 1991), puppet show and television special.
There is no reason why the phenomenon should ever run out of steam. Barrie may not have known quite what he was creating when he first tentatively offered the script to Charles Frohman, but in time he came to understand better than anyone else how and why the legend would endure – because people will persist in believing in fairies, adults will still yearn to recapture some fleeting part of their vanished youth, and girls will continue to grow up and have daughters.
“And thus it will go on,” he assures us confidently in the last line of the book Peter Pan, “so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.”
PS
I first came to J M Barrie through Andrew Birkin’s beautifully played and achingly sad 1977 TV drama series which starred Ian Holm, who might as well have been the author reincarnated, so perfectly did he embody the part. Mr Birkin’s book version of the story further contained a plethora of fascinating and poignant photos, many of which had been made available to him by the Llewelyn Davies family, together with a treasure trove of contemporary correspondence which had hitherto never been made public. So here was as detailed and nuanced a portrait of the writer as you were going to get, and you would not have wanted to be Barrie for all the crocodiles in Christendom. First becoming fascinated by the eldest boy George, and then the poetically inclined Michael when George grew out of him, Barrie lost them both to brutal deaths – George was killed at the front in the First World War, and Michael drowned while an undergraduate at Oxford. For all his worldly success, you would not have wanted to live the final fifteen years of that poor genius’s life.
As to the vexed question of why a grown man should become so interested in a family of pre-pubescent boys, that’s a peevish question born of the modern era, and easily dismissed. Their loving parents were in constant attendance, such warm intimacy could not have survived any hint of a transgressive move, and the man was simply too busy being inspired by them to need them for anything else. As Nico Llewelyn Davies, the youngest surviving son, put it in a letter to Andrew Birkin: “Barrie was an innocent – which is why he could write Peter Pan.”