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Critics grade the play and his performance as Captain Hook

First Night reviews: Peter Pan

By Sam Marlowe Theatre Savoy

(2 out of 5 stars)

THE author J. M. Barrie said of his play Peter Pan that "all the characters, whether grown-up or babies, must wear a child’s outlook on life as their only adornment". This Raymond Gubbay-produced show, directed by Steven Dexter, honours that instruction. The patriarchal Mr. Darling is as childish as his offspring and envies Nana, the family sheepdog, because she gets more cuddles than he does. Even Captain Hook and the pirates cry for their mummies. It’s a weird world, where strange and magical things can occur without explanation.

From the moment the ruched blue curtain rises on the Darlings’ Edwardian nursery, it’s clear that we are never intended to forget that this is theatre. More curtains, this time cardboard cutouts, hang above the stage and later become the waves of the lagoon in which the Neverland mermaids frolic.

At the rear, a starry night twinkles beyond a huge open window, through which Jack Blumenau’s sprightly, spiky-haired Peter Pan makes his airborne entrance.

The production’s air of unreality is well-suited to this tale of make-believe, but Francis O’Connor’s sets look decidedly cheap. The script has some slow, wordy interludes that make children fidget, and John Rigby’s synthesizer music is horribly tinny.

The cast manage to sprinkle a little sparkly fairy dust. Blumenau satisfyingly brings out capering Peter’s nasty streak, and Katie Foster-Barnes’s sweet Wendy captures the sense of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. The overgrown Lost Boys - a bunch of baby-talking adults - are irritating, unlike the aptly named Darling boys, who are enchantingly played by real children (Jack Dedman and Sam Mannox). But the pirates are jolly, and as Captain Hook, Anthony Head (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is highly entertaining. In leather and velvet with long dark locks, there’s a touch of Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen to this dandified tyrant, whose missing hand is replaced by a terrifying implement that is less hook than small scythe.

Head is great fun, too, as grumpy Mr Darling, complaining to his wife while testily brushing Nana’s hairs from his dinner jacket: "I sometimes think that it’s a mistake to have a dog as a nurse."

It’s a marvellous understatement: as that maligned hound, Mark Oxtoby is energetic and expressive, but I couldn’t help thinking that a canine nanny was the stuff of nightmares.

Despite some winning moments, though, this is a stodgy show that never conjures enough wonderment and exhilaration. It might charm and amuse intermittently, but it’s unlikely to leave anyone believing in fairies.

From Telegraph.co.uk :

Classic makes a crash landing

Charles Spencer reviews Peter Pan at the Savoy Theatre

Next year the impresario Raymond Gubbay plans to turn the Savoy into a new London home for popular opera. I’ve been looking forward to it. Having belatedly discovered the delights of classical music over the past couple of years, I feel it is time to screw my courage to the sticking point and dip a tentative toe into the mysteries of opera. Accessible, unashamedly middle-of-the-road productions would be just the ticket for a nervous beginner like me. But, if Gubbay’s lyric house treats opera with the cut-price ineptitude of his undercast and woefully uninspired Christmas production of Peter Pan, then I can’t see the project taking off.

Almost everything about the show is irredeemably second rate. There may be some flying sequences, but this is the budget airline of festive shows.

Though at least budget airlines get their passengers to their destinations safely. There was a hilarious moment on the first night when Wendy took off from Marooner’s Rock only to fly slap-bang into the scenery and slide slowly down to the floor. Somehow it seemed to sum up the whole dismally half-cocked show.

Trevor Nunn’s great productions of Peter Pan for the RSC and the National revealed J M Barrie’s play, a century old next year, as one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. Though often travestied as panto, there is something morbidly strange and urgently personal about Barrie’s story of the boy who wouldn’t grow up, with its haunting, grail-like vision of the sanctity of mother-love.

What Steven Dexter’s glumly pedestrian staging lacks is the required sense of weirdness. The play feels sanitised. Francis O’Connor’s designs have clearly been produced on a tight budget and often appear scrappy, with the pirate ship a particular disappointment. And, though it seems cruel to criticise the 17-year-old schoolboy Jack Blumenau, who has been unaccountably cast as Peter, he almost entirely lacks the charisma and heartless feral quality the role requires.

Katie Foster-Barnes is a bland Wendy, missing both the bossiness and the heartache of the character, and the only moment that moved me was Kathryn Evans’s great gulp of emotion when her lost children are finally restored to her. The big attraction is supposed to be Anthony Head, best known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and as the ghastly smoothie in those infuriating Gold Blend coffee commercials of the 1980s.

He promised he was going to be a terrifying Captain Hook, but, though he undoubtedly has stage presence, and his hook has been transformed into a vicious looking scythe, he doesn’t come close to matching Ian McKellen and David Bamber in the role.

As a former star of The Rocky Horror Show, he brings an air of theatrical camp to the role, and I like the way he stammers whenever he says the word mother, as though the victim of some terrible unspoken childhood trauma. But there isn’t nearly enough menace about his piratical old Etonian, while the great climactic battle scene lacks the swashbuckling bravado one is surely entitled to expect.

Dying, as Barrie tells us, may well be an awfully big adventure, but dying of boredom certainly isn’t, and I fear that will be the fate of many who take a punt on this disastrously underpowered production.

From Independent.co.uk :

Peter Pan, Savoy Theatre, London

(2 out of 5 stars)

By Rhoda Koenig

I’ve always felt uneasy about Peter Pan, perhaps because I’ve never seen a production that goes in wholeheartedly for either Edwardian charm or pagan passion. This one does neither, but JM Barrie’s weird combination of the two strains is probably irreconcilable - the right audience for it would seem to be not children on a jolly outing with parents but several hundred buttoned-up men of confused sexuality.

Steven Dexter’s production will not please them, nor theatregoers who just want to revel in a spectacle of magic and fantasy. Granted, this Peter Pan is here for a limited run, but the sets are horrible sugary-flimsy stuff, the Lost Boys’ home a field of polka-dot toadstools that would look more at home in Noddy-land than Neverland. The tameness and mediocrity of the production are encapsulated in Jack Blumenau’s Peter, a sharp-featured 17-year-old who is about as dangerous as the hedgehog whose hairdo he has been given. Barrie’s hero should be a tousle-haired, fearless little animal, quicksilver in mood and movement. Blumenau, however, is drab and plodding - when his good fairy swallows the medicine that Captain Hook has spiked (the director’s lax handling of the scene is also at fault), he says, "Tinkerbell drank the poison to save my life" with no anguish or ferocity. Not that one can feel too saddened by the loss of a such a cheapskate fairy - a mere roving spotlight with a giggle.

Katie Foster-Barnes makes an impressively convincing Wendy - her acting has the right formality for the period, and her articulation is splendid. She is a bit prim - one can’t really credit this well-behaved child offering to kiss the handsome boy who steals into her bedroom. But a Wendy who embodied the female qualities Barrie could evoke only to push away would not become the surrogate-mummy who sits darning socks while the boys fly off to have adventures. (Why does she have to darn the blasted things anyway? If Peter can fly all around London as well as Neverland, why doesn’t he just zip into Selfridges?)

Anthony Head’s Captain Hook cheered me up. Not only are his cultured tones a relief from the childish piping, but his performance has lots of funny little touches, such as the little jig his legs do when he thinks up some piece of wickedness. Ultimately, though, he is too low-key for this festival of froth.

As Mrs Darling, Kathryn Evans played her part beautifully, with a slight suggestion of the scatty comic actress Billie Burke. David Burt, though, was unpleasantly hammy as her husband. And there was one piece of extremely bad casting. The dog that played Nana was, I’m afraid, not up to the part at all. With her silly, immovable face, clumsy movements and white-rimmed eyes, one would think the part was played by an actor dressed up as a dog.