Skip to main content

Ella Hickson – Wendy and Peter Pan

When Ella Hickson first saw Peter Pan onstage, J.M. Barrie’s tale about the little boy who never grew up captured her imagination. Like most little girls, Hickson was asked to identify with Wendy, who becomes Peter’s sidekick as he magics her and her siblings to Neverland. A couple of decades on, Hickson’s own stage version of Barrie’s story is about to redress the gender balance in Wendy and Peter Pan at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh for the festive season. Despite this, that first experience of Barrie’s story has stayed with her.

“It was the flying,” Hickson explains, with more than a hint of wonder in her voice. “I think it’s the only kids story that has flying in it in a very clear and robust way. It’s magic, but it’s not about wizards. If Peter Pan was invented now it would be hard to pitch as a story. It’s not science-fiction and it’s not witchy. It has a fantasy element, but it’s about the power of imagination. That’s quite a hard sell.”

This didn’t stop Hickson writing her version for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2013 for a production featuring an eye-wateringly large cast of 23. While Eleanor Rhode’s new production won’t have that luxury, it will feature the starry presence of Isobel McArthur as Wendy and Sally Reid as Tinker Bell, here a much more grounded Tink.

The result is a story which, while fun for all ages, has a seriousness at its core that comes from Hickson looking at both Barrie’s novel and incidents from the author’s life which fed into much of his work. This stems in particular from the death of Barrie’s elder brother in an ice skating accident the day before his fourteenth birthday. It was he who Barrie based the idea of a boy who never grew up.

“It became clear to me that the book is about grief, and how you use a sense of escapism to deal with the darker things in life,” says Hickson. “It’s about how you get over the death of someone, and how a child deals with it using the power of imagination to make a sad family happy again.”

To illustrate this, Hickson has introduced an extra Darling child to her version of the story.

“He dies at the beginning of the play,’ says Hickson, “and Wendy goes to Neverland to try and find her brother, because that’s where lost boys go.”

Barrie first introduced Peter Pan to the world in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, a chapter in his 1902 novel, The Little White Bird, which was later published separately. Barrie’s creation later took flight in his play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. This was expanded in novel form as Peter and Wendy, published in 1911. Since then, Peter Pan has captivated audiences on page, stage and screen in numerous forms, but is best known by many as a mixture of Disney cartoon and thigh-slapping pantomime principal boy.

For Wendy and Peter Pan, Hickson has not only looked to Barrie’s original story, but has used the history of the time the book was written as a means to put Wendy centre-stage.  

“When Barrie wrote the original story,” says Hickson, “it was the time when Emily Pankhurst would have been in prison, so while he was writing it, she would have been on the front pages of the newspapers of the time. One of the things Pankhurst and the suffragettes were fighting for was this idea of girls not growing up and having to become wives and mothers, so that idea was floating around.”

Hickson first came to prominence a decade ago with her play, Eight, written while she was still a student at the University of Edinburgh, and which went on in New York and the West End. Since then, she has had work staged at Soho Theatre and the Almeida, while following the RSC’s production of Wendy and Peter Pan, Hicks explored her fantastical side further in an adaptation of Merlin at the Royal and Derngate, Northampton. For all her reimaginings of Barrie’s tale, Hickson has stayed true to her source.

“We do stay faithful to the story,’ she says. “Peter and Hook are still arch enemies, and we still have crocodiles, and all the lost boys are still in there, but we wanted to tell a children’s story in which little girls are at the centre in a way which they so often aren’t.”

Wendy and Peter Pan arrives at the Lyceum weeks after Jodie Whittaker made Dr Who her own in the face of criticism from some very lost boys. Hickson also cites animated series Tangled, or Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure, which puts the character best known from the Brothers Grimm story for being locked in a tower at the centre of some brand new adventures that seem to chime with Hickson’s own approach to creating female characters who can be heroines.

“There are lots of stories in which evil old women tend to kill beautiful young girls,” she says. “Even in Peter Pan, all the girls in the book try to kill Wendy while all the lost boys are having a great time. In the book as well, Tinker Bell is supposed to be this really curvy and quite sexy figure, so it’s been good to re-write those bits.”

While Wendy may be at the heart of Hickson’s play in a way that makes it eminently current, Wendy and Peter Pan aims to captivate children of all ages.  

 “I guess there’s something there about this universal theme of story-telling, and how you use the power of the imagination to cope with the realities of life,” says Hickson. “Putting Wendy at the centre of all this makes it feel even more like it’s a contemporary story that is very much about what women and girls can be now.”

Wendy and Peter Pan, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, November 29-January 5 2019

The Herald, November 27th 2018


ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...