Explicit constellation.
AT THE PLAY
.
"Peter Pan."
Peter Pan, the play, must by now have long overtaken the age of Peter Pan, the boy; but, like him, it never grows any older. The cast may change, but that seems to make hardly any difference. The new Peter (Miss Edna Best) is as good as any of them. Graceful of shape and lithe of limb, he is still essentially a boy, the realised figure of Barrie's fancy; a little aloof and inscrutable; romantic, too, in his very detachment from the sentiment of romance that he provokes. Miss Freda Godfrey, the new Wendy, would have seemed good if we had not known better ones. To be frank, she looked rather too mature for the part; she needed a more childlike air to give piquancy to her assumption of maternal responsibilities. It was pleasant to see Mr. Henry Ainley unbend to the task, simple for him, of playing Captain Hook and Mr. Darling. One admired his self-control in refusing to impose new subtleties upon established and sacred tradition.
Of familiar friends, age has not withered the compelling charms of Mr. Shelton's Smee, nor, in the person of Mr. Cleave, has custom staled the infinite futility of Slightly. I was glad, too, to find Miss Sybil Carlisle back in the part of Mrs. Darling, which she played most appealingly.
The lagoon scene was cut out this year; perhaps it was thought that there is enough lagoon in London just now. I could more willingly have spared the business of Mr. Darling and the kennel, the one blot in the play. My impression of this grotesquerie has not changed since I first saw Peter Pan.
Among new impressions was a feeling that the domestic details of the First Act are a little too leisurely, so that I appreciated the impatience of my little neighbour for the arrival of Peter Pan, whose acquaintance she had still to make. Also from the presence of children in my party I became conscious how much of the humour of the play—its burlesque, for example, of the stage villain—is only seizable by children who have grown up. Barrie wrote it, of course, to please the eternal child in himself, but forgot now and then what an unusual child it was.