When Alice Liddell Hargreaves met Peter Llewelyn Davies at the opening of a Lewis Carroll exhibition in 1932, the original Alice in Wonderland came face to face with the original Peter Pan. In John Logan’s remarkable new play, enchantment and reality collide as this brief encounter lays bare the lives of these two extraordinary characters.
Dame Judi Dench plays Alice, and Ben Whishaw plays Peter in Logan’s first new play since Red, which went on to win six Tony Awards in 2010.
Directed by Michael Grandage with set and costume design by Christopher Oram, Peter and Alice is running from 9 March to 1 June at the Noel Coward Theatre.
Book tickets now for this play which examines the real-life stories behind Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.
The play tells the story of when the original Alice in Wonderland, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, came face to face with the original Peter Pan, Peter Llewelyn Davies, at the opening of a Lewis Carroll exhibition in 1932. It marks the second of five productions in Michael Grandage's West End season.
With a cast also including Nicholas Farrell and Ruby Bentall, it runs at the Noel Coward Theatre until 1 June 2013.
…For as long as the play allows them, they give beautifully judged, melancholic but never sentimental performances, Dench ever practical in her snappy delivery and spiritual ache, Whishaw providing a much needed bolt of emotional fire and angst as his life crumbles backwards and forwards; he’s the most wonderfully watchable actor… Grandage marshals all this with his customary aplomb, and the scenic switches are delightful, quoting the drawings of John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham, but never forging those worlds into a new vision…
…It’s an appealing prospect, but not one that translates into a beguiling evening... The leads’ performances are touching... Each has a detailed intensity, and there are some poignant moments between them. John Logan’s play is packed with reminiscence... The production is attractive but at times laboured, and the writing is occasionally overblown... There are some elegant reflections on the allure of fantasy, the bruising effects of being a muse and the difficulty of leaving adolescence behind. But it’s too rhetorical – stuffed with questions, aphorisms and passages of effortful dialogue. Peter and Alice is short – less than an hour and a half, without an interval – yet feels flabby. It’s not Grandage at his best, even if for fans of the stars it may still be a treat.
…Watching them interact is a genuine, civilised joy. But in all honesty I got more out of the performance and Michael Grandage's production than I did out of John Logan's 90-minute play, which is an elegant literary conceit offering surprisingly few revelations… One of Judi Dench's great strengths… is her ability to combine ecstasy and melancholy, witnessed in abundance here... Whishaw is equally memorable as Peter... Grandage directs the actors with his customary unobtrusive excellence… Christopher Oram's designs also wittily use the framework and painted flats of a Pollock's Toy Theatre to whisk us back into the worlds of Neverland and Wonderland. It's not a play that shocks or startles by its insights, but the reward lies in watching Dench and Whishaw recreate the agony and the ecstasy of inherited fame.
…They both give beautiful, heart-catching performances in this haunting play that sounds profound notes of loss and grief… this is a play that breaks the surly bonds of naturalism – as it should in a work inspired by fantastical fiction. In Christopher Oram’s enchanting design the drab backroom gives way to Alice’s Oxford, and Peter’s Neverland with sets that resemble a Pollock’s toy theatre… There is a particularly telling dramatic moment in Michael Grandage’s poignant and spellbinding production… The losses both characters endured during the First World War are movingly captured… It’s a beautiful and searching play that will live long in the memory.
…the piece, to my mind, is also laboured and over-written and, though it does not accuse the authors of actual paedophilia, it smears their reputations on the basis of little hard evidence… Dench and Whishaw are incapable of giving bad performances and he brings to Peter his wonderful capacity to make sensitivity and anguish compelling and she lends to Alice her brilliance at combining a sense of tart, witty combativeness with a reverberant depth of bruised humanity. But the proceedings reminded me at times more of oratorio than drama and the dialogue often sounds forced... The evening strikes me as that true rarity: a Grandage dud.
Libby Purves The Times ★★★★★
…The result is shattering in its intensity. For much of its 90 minutes, Michael Grandage’s latest production had me in a Pool of Tears as bad as Alice’s… Dench is unmatchable: old Alice stiff and snappish in the bookshop, suddenly shedding years to skip upstage into the cardboard fantasy, young beneath white hair, matronly frock swinging free. If you are growing old, or love the old and recognise their youthfulness, it breaks your heart open. Hard to know whether without Dench Logan’s play will endure: maybe its power is as evanescent as Grandage’s production and its breathtaking toy-theatre staging.
…the swoon casting of Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw aside, this play about the real life inspirations for Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan is hardly the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters… Logan beautifully particularises the psychological trauma of two adults whose childhood selves were on one level never allowed to grow up. All the greater pity then that Grandage delivers an uncustomary fussy production that accentuates rather than leavens the more contrived, self-conscious elements of Logan’s sometimes extravagantly wordy script.
…Dame Judi and Mr Whishaw are good, she almost Queen Motherly these days, he so sensitive, so irredeemably moist, that he could do with sponging. But the play, while admirably high-minded and interesting, is inevitably a bit doom-laden… several passages of a bleakness that is poetic and beautiful… Mr Logan’s script is eloquent but not always theatrical… Well done, but not exactly a ray of hope for Easter, this one.
Fans of the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, written by John Logan, will be thrilled to discover that the author has put M and Q – ie, Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw – back together again as an ageing Alice in Wonderland and a neurasthenic, withdrawn Peter Pan.
So, the second offering of the Michael Grandage season is almost certainly off to a box-office flyer though, despite the weather, this is not the first fun-filled Christmas show of the year.
Rather, it’s a tortured imagining of how the conversation might have gone when the two real life models for those inventions of Lewis Carroll and J M Barrie – Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewelyn Davies – met, as they did, in a London bookshop in 1932.
Dame Judi’s Alice, now eighty, with untended wispy white hair and wrapped in a fur stole, reveals that she’s sold the hand-written Alice manuscript to pay the heating bills. Whishaw’s Peter, haggard and unshaven, possibly drunk, suggests that childhood has given them a bank of memories to store against future suffering.
For as long as the play allows them, they give beautifully judged, melancholic but never sentimental performances, Dench ever practical in her snappy delivery and spiritual ache, Whishaw providing a much needed bolt of emotional fire and angst as his life crumbles backwards and forwards; he’s the most wonderfully watchable actor.
[WOS_QU@TE]#Fascination at how Logan will juggle the balls he's thrown in the air gives way to disappointment as they thud to the floor[/WOS_QU@TE]
The two of them are at first “backstage” in a large, grimy, sunlit den of books before making a public appearance. And as the bookshop flies out, Christopher Oram’s toy theatre design sucks them into their own fictional selves, and their chat about loss of childhood and growing old spreads, tendril-like, into a theatrical, thematic overlapping.
There is old Lewis Carroll himself (Nicholas Farrell) silhouetted against a painted backdrop of the Cherwell River and the university buildings; and here comes J M Barrie (Derek Riddell) challenging Peter to an awfully big adventure. Then the young Peter (Olly Alexander) flies across the stage, and long-haired Alice (Ruby Bentall) ascends from below for the “golden day” of reckoning.
Fascination at how Logan will juggle the balls he’s thrown in the air gives way to disappointment as they thud to the floor. Older Alice asks the “molestation” question and penetrates Carroll’s “dark room” for the photo session, and older Peter suggests a different line of enquiry altogether in a snapshot of his brother Michael (Stefano Braschi) drowning in Oxford in the embrace of his lover – Peter Pan!
Things aren’t shaking out too well. Lewis has all but disappeared as the shadows of guilt and sorrow loom large and Alice endures the loss of her sons in the Great War. The younger pair, now locked in fictional conspiracy, drive their disappointing representatives back into the world of adulthood.
Grandage marshals all this with his customary aplomb, and the scenic switches are delightful, quoting the drawings of John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham, but never forging those worlds into a new vision. Alice, to add to the confusion, starts morphing into Wendy, finding common ground in two types of bossiness. I look forward to the Whatsonstage.com Q and A session. Or should that be the Q and M session?
