Following their recent West End smash hit, The Play that Goes Wrong, Mischief Theatre have returned with a new offering: Peter Pan goes Wrong. The play-within-a-play tells the story of a disastrous production of Peter Pan, staged by the hapless Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society. The performance is a hilarious catastrophe from start to finish, superbly and energetically acted by the ten-strong-cast.
The (real) actors play a motley crew of melodramatic and accident-prone amateur thesps, who each portray multiple roles as the cast of Peter Pan. Keen to distance themselves from calamitous earlier productions, the Drama Society assure the audience that this time the play will be carried off without a hitch. However, within the first few minutes, an actor has to be sawn out of a door, the beds of the three Darling children collapse onto one another, and the sound effects are severely malfunctioning.
The show continues in this vein until the hysterical climax of act two in which technicians are unable to stop the stage from rotating, giving us a glimpse of the scandalous backstage life of the ‘cast’. All of this plays out to the soundtrack of a pirate shanty sung by actors who helplessly revolve in and out of view.
Beneath the farcical surface of this piece lies excellent direction and careful choreography. The writing is funny and original, and is complemented by the use of clever staging and set design. The humour at times feels a little samey, and two hours of slapstick and schadenfreude is probably as much as anyone can take. But don’t let that put you off- this is slapstick at its best. Cringes quickly gave way to giggles, and by the end of the first scene the audience was crying with laughter. This could well be the funniest piece of theatre around at the moment, delivered by a young and exciting group.
If you are suffering from post-Christmas overindulgence and an impending January-blues, grab a ticket to one of Mischief’s current productions. Peter Pan Goes Wrong is at the Pleasance Theatre in London until 5th January, and The Play That Goes Wrong comes to the Oxford Playhouse from the 27th January-1st February. You might just change your mind about slapstick. I know I did.
