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100 Years of Peter Pan
…or, Do You Really Want to Believe in Fairies?

Part IV

By J D Atkinson (2004)

This article is dedicated to the memory of my mother Wendy Atkinson (1936-1988)

Dateline: 28th September, 2004

Of course, after the defeat of Captain Hook the children return to the security of their middle-class home in Edwardian London. So do the Lost Boys, who are adopted by Mr and Mrs Darling and sent unwillingly to school. Their ability to fly soon fades away, years pass and eventually they are "grown up and done for" (PP2) as pillars of the community; John becomes a "bearded man who doesn't know any story to tell his children." (PP2) Barrie's imaginary future may have no First World War but it has no happy endings either, at least for the male characters.

Wendy's case is quite different, and PP2 ends with a heartrending scene that has occasionally been dramatized as an epilogue to the original play. Although she is now married and the mother of Jane, Wendy still lives at the old address in Bloomsbury - we are told that "Mrs Darling was now dead and forgotten" and Mr Darling has sold the house to his daughter and son-in-law. One evening Peter flies into the darkened nursery, totally unaware of the fact that many years have passed and Wendy's Never Land days are over. "I am old, Peter. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago," she says, turning on the light to reveal Jane asleep in her bed. Peter is distraught to find that Wendy has broken her promise never to grow up, and even threatens the sleeping child with his knife. We are left in no doubt that his eternal childhood is genuinely tragic - an aspect of the story that is too often glossed over and which has obviously never occurred to Michael Jackson, that modern master of Never Land.

Twenty-two years after seeing John Caird and Trevor Nunn's RSC production of Peter Pan, in which Peter was played by Miles Anderson and Wendy by Jane Carr, I still have vivid memories of this scene and the effect it had on the audience; children and adults (including my mother and I) were leaning forward in their seats with tears streaming down their faces. Catharsis is hardly a word one associates with Peter Pan, but as the audience filed out into the night wiping their eyes passers-by could have been forgiven for thinking that we had just seen a production of King Lear or Antigone. Even without this scene there is much in Barrie's unique play to evoke pity and terror.

Finally, even though all but the most curmudgeonly of adults are prepared to clap their hands in order to save Tinker Bell's life, we all know that there are no such things as fairies. Or do we? Having invented a humanoid race on which to project our anxieties about sex, parenthood, death and the dangers that lurk in the dark, it seems that some of us are unwilling to let the little people fade away. Fairies have simply been relocated to interstellar space and rebranded as aliens, creatures who fit comfortably into the belief systems of people brought up on bad science fiction and worse pseudo-science. Abduction, the use of humans for genetic experiments and cross-breeding, mysterious artifacts from other worlds given to favoured "contactees"… we've heard it all before but this time we can also read about it in the supermarket tabloids. How the mythology of the New Fairies will develop over the next century remains to be seen, but it's a fair bet that in 2104 - indeed, "so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless" - Peter Pan will still be captivating children and adults alike.

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©Peter Lathan 2004