The Admirable Crichton

What if Lord of the Flies happened, except everyone is adult and civilised? Of course, this was written decades before William Golding's only good book and Barrie's aims were more by way of social satire via comedy of manners than getting in-yer-face with the underlying brutal savagery of human nature, papered over by civilisation. Which in turn was JG Ballard's favourite theme, though he probably never quite succeeded so spectacularly.

But back to Barrie: You can rip through this in no time and be gently amused but it's about an alien world for most of us - hardly anybody has even one live in servant any more of course, let alone an entire staff of hierarchically minded people presided over by a Butler who keeps everyone rigidly in their places. Probably why it's nowhere near as famous as a play about a boy who never grew up - because we all had a childhood, whenever or wherever we lived.

Peter Pan & When Wendy Grew Up

The Boy Who Never Grew Up: Tragic figure or victorius immortal? You decide. A clever, witty meditation on childhood, imagination and growing up, appreciable in contrasting ways by the young and the old in the audience. A challenge to stage, even now, I suspect, and an acting challenge for the cast, too, I would guess. Delightful, bitter-sweet and perhaps made more so by the addition of the short When Wendy Grew Up, often staged as a coda to the action of Peter Pan.

What Every Woman Knows

I don't really want to spoil the plot of this play at all. It's about a plain-looking woman who is under-estimated by everybody, written when the women's suffrage movement was under way but not yet successful and published first in the year 1918 - when women first got the vote in Britain. It's depressing how relevant this play is a century later.

I found it delightful - far better than either The Admirable Crichton or Peter Pan (and I liked both of those). Gentle comedy based on a preposterous initial incident leads to an examination of gender roles and questions particularly, what men value as compared to what they perhaps should.

Mary Rose

What an odd little play! Themes of magic, islands and suspended aging re-appear but the brevity leads to thin characterisation, thus making it less moving than perhaps it should be. ( )

This book has been entered into some databases under the titles of the plays rather than the title of the book. If you are looking for it try searching under “The Admirable Crichton”.

Peter Pan is an amazing read. Act 1 is a masterpiece that can happily hold its head up in any company. What surprised me is that Peter Pan is dead. You'll notice that he is dressed in autumn leaves and cobwebs. So when he leaves his shadow behind, the shadow of death is in the nursery. When Wendy tries to touch him he says she must not, but cannot explain why. This is a reference to The Gospel of John 20:17 where the resurrected Jesus says “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” Peter doesn't know why he can't be touched because he's only a little boy. The other God Peter is is Pan. Apparently, hunters used to whip his statue when they were unsuccessful, so there seems to be some sort of power over life and death and he was once famously proclaimed to be dead. All of which would make Captain Hook the devil… if indeed he and Peter are different people. Bear all this in mind and everything else in the play will follow, but like all great pieces of writing other interpretations are available. A previous owner of my copy left me his annotations. Most made perfect sense, but there were several apparently quite serious references to anuses that I could make nothing of.

I only came for the main show but stayed for the entire performance. The other three plays are evidence of a clever man at the top of his game and in total control of his craft. Flawless in construction with charming characters and all very funny. But each of them has a darker edge. Crichton and What Every Woman Knows will challenge you to consider your opinions of class and gender respectively. Mary Rose is frankly chilling. All the plays have certain idiosyncrasies of vision: obsessions with islands and the reversal of roles, for example, that make them very individual productions. ( )