Peter and Alice at The Noel Coward Theatre

When I heard the wonderful Michael Grandage was directing a new play designed by Christopher Oram and starring Judi Dench and Ben Wishaw, I had no hesitation in booking seats.  Having seen it, I’m glad those tickets were booked, but the play, I’m afraid, is disappointing.

John Logan has written about the real-life encounter in 1932 between the then eighty year old, Alice Liddell Hargreaves and thirty five year old Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan respectively.  Their imagined conversation takes place in a musty, dark bookshop and we’re soon whisked back in time as they recall their past lives.  As one would expect, Christopher Oram’s design is superb, contrasting the claustrophobic nature of the bookshop, with a huge, old-fashioned pop up book design, depicting fairy-tale illustrations of Alice’s Wonderland adventures and Peter Pan’s nemesis, Captain Hook.

Dame Judi and Ben Wishaw are also wonderful.  Her mink clad Alice starts the play stiff with age, depression and disappointment but as she relives the happy past, the girl within escapes, the stiffness only re-appearing when the tragedies of the war cloud her memory.  Ben Wishaw’s Peter, however, never seems to lighten.  His memories are dark and his anxious, vulnerable state at the beginning of the play is always there.  This is an intelligent, articulate man who is haunted by his childhood.  A man uncomfortable in his own skin, for whom the notoriety of being the inspiration for Peter Pan is the worst thing that could have happened to him.  This contrasts with the much more self assured Alice.  Unsurprisingly their deaths, which are alluded to but not shown, are also polar opposites, Liddell dying peacefully and Davies committing suicide.  As you can probably tell, this is quite a bleak play!

There are other characters to be seen.  We meet a rather cruel Barrie played by Derek Riddell, Nicholas Farrell portraying Carroll, in my interpretation at least, a closet pederast, Ruby Bentall as the po-faced, sneering Alice, a fey, leaf clad Peter Pan portrayed by Olly Alexander and Stefano Braschi as the wheelchair bound Arthur, Davies’s cancer stricken father.

Despite Michael Grandage’s sterling efforts, I’m afraid nothing can stop this play about growing older and how we are all shaped by our childhoods, from being a bit of a jumble, switching as it does from the present, to the past, via memory and fantasy.  It is also too wordy and leaden and I found myself losing concentration on more than one occasion. 

Still, no matter, it was wonderful to see the eighty years young Dame Judi in her usual glowing form and the wistful presence of the excellent Ben Wishaw who never plays a wrong note whatever he does.