Yes, our website is salvaged from savage pirates, and we have a lot of news to catch up on. Speaking of pirates… Peter Pan! (Sorry, that was a horrible transition. We’re a little rusty.) John Logan has written a play about Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the muse for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) and Peter Llewelyn Davies (the Peter who inspired J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan). It’s called Peter and Alice. What might they have said to one another when they were older? We’ll find out in March 2013 on the London stage, where the roles will be played by Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw. The playwright won an Academy Award for writing the movie Gladiator, so hopefully Alice and Peter will fight lions! Or, have tea and discuss “questions about how people cope with being hurled into the public eye as children.”
From the Michael Grandage Company’s website:
“Of course that’s how it begins: a harmless fairy tale to pass the hours”
When Alice Liddell Hargreaves met Peter Llewelyn Davies at the opening of a Lewis Carroll exhibition in 1932, the original Alice in Wonderland came face to face with the original Peter Pan. In John Logan’s remarkable new play, enchantment and reality collide as this brief encounter lays bare the lives of these two extraordinary characters.
Judi Dench plays Alice and Ben Whishaw plays Peter in Logan’s first new play since Red, which went on to win six Tony Awards in 2010.
Director Michael Grandage
Set and Costume Designer Christopher Oram
Lighting Designer Paule Constable
Composer and Sound Designer Adam Cork
I write on the eve of opening night, but my wife and I saw this during previews last week thanks to nabbing two chance return tickets of this sold-out show. It could not have an abler cast or more generous production values. Most of the audience seemed thrilled by the uninterrupted 90-minute event, but it is just the kind of “play” I dislike. Without spoiling the surprises, I will say it is not realistic or bound by the stated premise for more than what seems minutes. Though we see plenty of stage business and spectacle, the script would make as much sense as a radio piece for six voices. A grim debate about “growing up” in high-flown rhetoric mingles with often surreally altered and intermixed dialog from Carroll and Barrie as we work our way through the darkest and most disturbing elements of the biographies of Mrs. Hargreaves and Mr. Llewelyn Davies. I believe some of the “facts” are misleadingly stated if not downright false, but they often draw gasps. Ben Whishaw acts his heart out. The sets are brilliant. The tickets are expensive though there are a limited number of 10-pound seats available to those who queue early each morning.