It is wonderful thing when writing a press preview to immediately feel welcomed into the family of the cast and crew. Co-Director Adam Scott Taylor took me into a JCR which has been transformed into a comfy dorm room and was clearly delighted with how his production has shaped out so far. Students were warming up and laughing in pyjamas, already in the realm of children play-acting and loving every minute of it. I was asked to sit on the floor (bean bags and duvets will be provided for the actual show) and to relax and enjoy the proceedings. Taylor’s partner, Liam Steward-George, sought me out and was equally delightful, and I felt more like I was a young child in boarding school, being looked after by two kindly teachers, than about to review a play. And this is exactly the impression this clever pair had sought to give. Before the play even starts, you know you’re going to like it. And you won’t be disappointed.
Obviously, being performed in a college room, the play is not awash with technical features (Peter Pan is hardly going to be suspended from invisible wire, floating around the audience’s heads). But this is not an issue in this production. Taylor and Steward-George have decided to tell the whole story as if it were a piece of play-acting, a bed-time enactment of a fairy-tale. Thus, university actors are playing seven year old children who are playing forty year old adults. Such an effect looks and feels easy in this show, and that is a testament to the amount of work that must have been put in to the characterisation; it is not an easy technique to master. Highlights include Will Mendelowitz’s Mr Darling/Captain Hook. His interpretation of both roles is every bit convincing as a child impersonating his father or a wicked uncle. Emily Gill too, as Mrs Darling, is able to capture that same childish hyperbolic representation of her elders. On a similar note, I never thought that a twenty-something year old girl with a splotch of face paint writhing about on the floor in a pink onesie could be convincing as a Newfoundland called Nana, but Rosalind Stone’s commitment to the role of the “child-dog” is heart-warming. I almost welled up when the children “ahhhed” as mean Mr Darling played a nasty trick on her by putting yucky medicine in her milk bowl.
As an ensemble, the cast fit together well. Wendy (Eídín Crowdy), Peter (Michael Gale) and Tinkerbell’s (Azmina Siddique) work wonderfully as a trio, particularly in that famous “shadow scene” (a great piece of choreography ensues as Wendy sews Peter to his shadow, played by Zippy Bakowska, and Tink sulks at their imminent bonding). Similarly, the banter between the lost boys and the pirates fits together nicely; the humour is infectious and I spent most of these scenes chuckling happily to myself.
A quick word too on the innovative staging. The directorial pair have managed to make one sofa serve as a bed, a cave, a house and a means of creating an impression of Peter flying (this itself is reason enough to see the play) and have incorporated every inch of the room into the stage-play-world; I kept having to move my feet as overexcited “children” bounded past me in delight.
The songs, for the most part, work well and will give the opportunity for some fun audience interaction but the only point I would make is that Crowdy’s Wendy needs a bit more projection on her solo as she is sometimes drowned out by the chorus.
With a full band, sixty audience members snuggled up together and more fun than you can shake a stick at, there is no reason why anyone should not see this play. Oxford drama so often takes itself too seriously and it’s nice to see that a team separate from the “OUDS pack” can put on something so uplifting and silly, yet still theatrically well considered and constructed. Go. And if you don’t like it, you’re dead inside.
