Book Chapter

Peter and Pantomime

Stirling, Kirsten, Kirsten Stirling

2012

Overview

The first night of Peter Pan as seen in Finding Neverland (2004) shows the theatre audience, largely composed of London high society dressed in its finest, tut-tutting at the arrival of a group of shabbily dressed orphans. The adults are bemused as the curtain rises on an actor dressed as an oversize dog, on all fours, picking up children's clothes and shepherding the smallest of three children towards his bath. There are raised eyebrows and sideways glances. Barrie (played by Johnny Depp) paces like an expectant father of old in the wings. Will the audience's palpable displeasure kill the play? But everything turns out all right. The shabbily dressed orphans strategically scattered throughout the theatre respond with unforced laughter and shrieks of delight, infecting the adult audience with their enthusiasm. By the end, the adults are clapping louder than the children. It makes a good scene. But, as so often in Finding Neverland, there is an element of invention. Peter Pan premiered on 26 December 1904 to an entirely adult audience, many of them professional critics (Mackail 1941: 366). Yet the sight of a man in an animal suit would not have been completely unfamiliar to the London audience. Pantomime had existed in England in different forms for over a hundred and fifty years, and although the heyday of the English pantomime was the 1870s, it was still a hardy annual tradition in 1904. Peter Pan premiered during the Christmas season, as a rival production to Drury Lane's long-standing annual pantomime extravaganza. The production was thus clearly playing on the audience's assumed familiarity with pantomime, and a contemporary review titled \"Mr Barrie's Peter Pan-tomime\" (27 December 1904) firmly situates the play in relation to the genre (Rose 1984: 95).

• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 0415888646, 9781138849693, 9780415888646, 1138849693