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by Ella Hickson, directed by Thomas Morgan Jones

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

June 15-October 27, 2024

Tinkerbell: “Plans are so boring snoring”

The Stratford Festival is currently presenting the North American premiere of Wendy & Peter Pan, a play from 2013 by British playwright Ella Hickson. It is the most morbid, preachy and boring version of the Peter Pan story I have ever seen. The show has none of the fun and excitement of J.M. Barrie’s original play, Peter Pan (1904), seen at Stratford in 2010. The production is loud, shouty and dark and Hickson has given the story a number of twists that ultimately make nonsense of it. I felt sorry for all the parents who had brought their children to the show hoping they would have a good time.

Providing children with an enjoyable experience of theatre is not one of Hickson’s priorities. Parents should read the play’s Audience Advisory carefully. It states: “This production contains some staged violence and death, including the death of a child, and uses language and situations that purposefully explore gender stereotypes and sexism”. Violence and death are not central to Barrie’s original play, but Hickson had decided that Peter Pan is all about grief. This is because Barrie’s younger brother David died in an accident just before he would have turned 14. Barrie’s mother found solace in the fact that David would always be a child and never grow up. Though this is typically Victorian morbidity that sentimentalizes the innocence of children, Hickson has brought this biographical detail into her adaptation.

Hickson gives the three Darling children – Wendy, John and Michael – a younger brother named Tom who dies on stage in the first scene. A year later the Darling parents are still suffering from grief and, of the children Wendy, the oldest, is most deeply affected. When Peter Pan arrives and tells Wendy that he lives on an island inhabited by Lost Boys, she begs him to take her and her brothers there to find Tom. In the rather creepy psychology Hickson gives Wendy, Wendy does not accept that Tom is dead but just missing” or “lost”, and she therefore thinks she can find him again among Peter’s Lost Boys.

Turning Peter Pan into a play about grief instantly drains it of any lightheartedness. In Barrie’s original, the Lost Boys are so called because they are boys "who fall out of their prams when the nurse is looking the other way and if they are not claimed in seven days, they are sent far away to Neverland”. This sense of whimsy is lost and the joke about Slightly Soiled’s name no longer makes sense. Near the play’s ending after Wendy asks for the umpteenth time where Tom is, Peter tells her that little boys when they die become stars and if their family thinks happy thoughts about them the boys appear in Neverland and play forever.

This new definition Hickson gives the Lost Boys means that all the boys in Neverland are dead. Peter Pan, “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”, according to the subtitle of Barrie’s play, will not grow up because of his stubbornness as in Barrie, but because he’s dead. Sure enough, when Wendy, John and Michael manage to think happy thoughts about Tom, he suddenly appears among the Lost Boys, greets them and goes off to play. What a horribly warped idea.

Hickson’s notion makes nonsense of the action in two ways. First, All of Captain Hook’s attempts to kill Peter are in vain since Peter is already dead. And how can these reanimated dead boys “kill” living beings like the Pirates? Are they corporeal spirits or zombies? Whatever they are, Hickson reimagining has made them unsuitable subject matter for a children’s play. Second, Wendy keeps asking twhere Tom is hroughout the play until it becomes annoying. The answer Peter gives her at the end of the play he could very well have given her the first time she asks. Hickson’s thus makes the entire action of the play from the Darlings’ arrival in Neverland on dependant on the artifice of delaying Peter’s answering Wendy’s persistent question. This artifice thus renders all the Neverland action, including three more onstage deaths not in Barrie, totally pointless.

The only purpose of the action is related to Hickson’s second goal in altering Barrie’s play. She wants to feminize the play by making Wendy, not Peter, the main character. Hickson therefore shows us how Wendy grows from being a weak and frightened young woman to a strong and powerful young woman. We know she has become brave and strong by the end only because Hickson has Wendy tell us so repeatedly.

This plan of Hickson’s causes two additional problems. First, it requires Hickson to present Wendy at first as much more of a typically Victorian fainting female, whereas Barrie’s Wendy is strong, brave and resourceful from the beginning. Second, Hickson sends conflicting messages about what being a “strong” woman actually means. On the one hand, she wants women to be seen as peacemakers as when Wendy stops the fighting between Tinkerbell and Tiger Lily. On the other hand, she wants women to be seen as fierce warriors, like Tiger Lily, who can triumph in battle. So, which is it?

Fantasy worlds have their own logic, but Hickson, in trying to force her own lessons on the Peter Pan story, ruins the logic of Barrie’s world and makes it confusing at best, grim and grotesque at worst. Barrie was able to indicate ideas through theatrical metaphors. Ian Judge’s and Christopher Newton’s renowned productions of the play for the Shaw Festival in 1987-88 and 2001 followed the tradition of having the actor playing Mr. Darling also play Captain Hook. This traditional doubling not only brings out the Oedipal aspects of the story but fulfills Bruno Bettelheim’s view of children’s stories as a means children use for coping with the all-powerful adults who control them. Hickson misses this point entirely. Her adaptation is about the living and the dead, men and women, not, as would seem more logical, about adults and children.

The worst example involves the Crocodile. In Barrie the Crocodile has swallowed not only Captain Hook’s hand but a clock. It is from the clock’s ticking that Hook can perceive the crocodile approach. This is a wonderful metaphor for Hook’s fear of death through the literal approach of time. Hickson, however, eliminates the clock, and instead has Hook deliver a monologue about growing old which makes him jealous of the Lost Boys who do not grow old. Once we learn that the Lost Boys don’t grow old because they’re dead we wonder how Hook can be jealous of them.

Hickson’s do-gooder meddling has thus taken a play which has entertained adults and children for more than 100 years and turned it into a boring and macabre mess. The nadir of her poor rethinking of a children’s play is to have Hook apparently kill Peter and end act 1 with Peter’s lifeless body on the stage. Unsurprisingly, no one felt like applauding. She leaves the children with this depressing image in their minds throughout the intermission. At the start of Act 2, Peter suddenly jumps up and shows he was only playing dead, but we don’t feel relief. Instead, as in any trick of this kind, we are angry at being deceived and more depressed because of it.

When Hickson’s adaptation was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2013, it was praised for its spectacular production. Stratford has not bothered to make its staging remotely spectacular. There is lots of flying with the wires more than usually visible. It’s hard to know whether this is intentional or not. The set Robin Fisher has designed for the Darling children’s bedroom is in tasteful period style, but her imagination seems to have failed her when designing Neverland. The island is represented by three collapsible trees, the Lost Boys’ home looks like a series of burial mounds and the parts of the grotesque pirate ship are not always aligned. Fisher’s best design is the slow-slung crocodile-mobile that periodically Marcus Nance drives about the set. Lighting designer Arun Srinivasan assures that every scene in Neverland looks sickly and gloomy.

With a cheerless adaptation and a lugubrious production design, it’s up to the actors to bring some life to Hickson’s tale of dead children. The fun-averse Hickson has, of course, eliminated one of children’s most favourite characters, i.e., Nana the Newfoundland dog/governess. This likely because she wants to purge the “real” world of the Darling family of any fantasy elements. Yet, Hickson also eliminates the Mermaids from the show, even though she has Michael grow so excited about seeing mermaids when he gets to Neverland.

Of the main characters Jake Runeckles makes an odd, one-note Peter Pan. Runeckles is a very physical performer and when not speaking crouches with arms and fingers outstretched and head rolling like some sort of ghoul. Why Wendy should care about him or he about her is a mystery.

Laura Condlln, one of Stratford’s finest actors, is given a Captain Hook who has been shorn of everything that, in Barrie, makes the role a joy to play. In Barrie, Captain Hook is an egocentric actor full of bombastic speech who is constantly looking about to note the effect he is having. There is no comedy in this Hook. Hickson has him slit another pirate’s throat right in front of us right after we meet him. Condlln makes Hook no foolish villain but rather someone who is morose, moody and introspective.

As Hickson’s new hero Wendy, Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks shows a wide range of emotions but always speaks in the same piercing tones. Unlike Wendy in Barrie, Hickson’s Wendy seems more like a puppet of the playwright’s agenda than a real person. Wendy’s obsession with bringing her dead brother back to London is such an obstinate denial of reality that it becomes increasingly hard to sympathize with her.

Many of the lesser characters fare much better. Noah Beemer as John, Justin Eddy as Michael and Chris Vergara as Tom all manage to play children without resorting to shouting. Beemer is great at imitating the way real children move. Hickson has imagined Michael as uninterested in boyish pursuits, a point that Eddy brings unashamedly brings out. Sean Arbuckle and Agnes Tong are a fine Mr. and Mrs. Darling. We initially think the couple fall out because Mrs. Darling is still grieving for Tom. Later, we find, to our surprise, that she has become a suffragette and plans to take a job and Mr. Darling does not object.

Hickson has decided Tinkerbell should not just be a ball of light flitting about. Nestor Lozano Jr. plays her as if she were in a perpetual state of irritation. This is one time when I didn’t really care if she was brought back to life. In contrast the most loveable character in neverland turns out to be Smee played by Sara-Jeanne Hosie (who gleefully played Captain Hook’s wife in a Ross Petty panto). Hickson has Smee trapped in unrequited love for Hook, and Hosie makes us feel for the kindly, thwarted pirate. Smee’s death (not in Barrie) is really the only one after Tom’s that we really care about.

The Lost Boys, like all the Pirates, are shouters and when both groups are on stage all we hear is a racket rather than any clear speech. Fight director Anita Nittoly has staged a series of the most unconvincing fights I’ve ever seen. The performers still act as if they are consciously moving their weapons from point A to point B, as if still in rehearsal. The scene that garnered the greatest response from the children in the whole play was when Nittoly staged the action in slow motion so we could see actors ducking under or arching back from moving swords. This is likely because the moves in the slo-mo fight were more realistic and more followable than those in regular tempo.

If parents want to introduce their children to one of the great fantasy stories in English literature, Wendy & Peter Pan is not the play to see. It is pervaded with death and violence that overshadow the female-power agenda Hickson is trying to promote. It provides disappointment for the whole family.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Jake Runeckles as Peter Pan and Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks as Wendy; Agnes Tong as Mrs. Darling, Sean Arbuckle (with lampshade) as Mr. Darling with Justin Eddy as Michael, Chris Vergara as Tom, Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks as Wendy and Noah Beemer as John; Sara-Jeanne Hosie as Smee and Laura Condlln as Captain Hook. © 2024 David Hou. 

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca