STAGEPeter And Alice
Noel Coward Theatre
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw illuminate a mournful encounter between the real-life Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan.
REVIEW
When Christopher Oram's dusty bookshop backdrop rises to reveal a world of childhood imagery - Cheshire cats, pirate ships, Red Queens, moonscapes - then the magic behind the book covers is undammed and floods the stage.
If an encounter between the (real-life) Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan never happened, it would be invented for a conceit such as this.
That their paths did cross - in 1932 when she was 80 and he 35 - gives an added thrill to a theatrical prospect that only marginally overshadows the anticipation of on-stage encounter between the irredeemably majestic Judi Dench and charmingly gauche Ben Whishaw.
The two twirl around their childhoods like strands of DNA, linked by their early fate and fame. The sinuous, poetic prose from John Logan only enhances their flights of inquiry.
Peter is the more stubbornly forensic of the two, and the most damaged, but the haughty Alice seems to fall further. Their interplay, inevitably, is mesmeric.
But this is a melancholy, self-involved piece without much light to illuminate the shadows. The lurch from the joys and whimsies of childhood to the brutal, bill-paying function of adulthood would be a yowling rip in the best of circumstances.
But neither Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies saw the best of circumstances.
Their lives were scythed by the first world war, which took family members and, in Peter's case, his sanity.
And beyond that horror, there were everyday disappointments. Their attempts to retrieve their golden summers and weigh their fame-in-amber childhoods against those of their siblings is a lesson in self-flagellation. Why go there when the answers, or the lack of them, will amount to the same each time?
But playwright John Logan and director Michael Grandage prod and push them there time and again, torturing his protagonists as they dissect the foibles and ambitions of their patrons - the stuttering Charles Dodgson (Nicholas Farrell) and the needy JM Barrie (Derek Riddell).
In this overwritten merry-go-round of remembrances, there is some relief. Peter Pan (Olly Alexander) bounces like a puppy and Alice (Ruby Bentall) is bold and fresh. Both find the adults' nostalgic indulgence boring and long for sword fights and romance, a sentiment shared by the audience whose patience is tested even in this 90 minute work.
Although lyrical and moving - and acted with delicacy and grace - there is a sense that a blast of fresh air through the bookshop would heal old wounds with much less pain than the tortuously slow pulling of the plaster.
Until June 1. Go to delfontmackintosh.co.uk
