Mary Rose

A deeply unsettling play about the abduction of a girl in 1890 and her reappearance twenty-five years later. When Barrie came to write Mary Rose in the aftermath of WW1, his own awareness of a tragic tension between time and timelessness had become a nation’s. The play examines a central nerve at the time of children not returning or missing presumed dead and touches on many of Barrie’s obsessions; the loss of innocence, eternal youth and the tricks of time. Described as a play about the happy anguish of peace, this is a spiritual, deeply disturbing piece. The Great War is over. A soldier returns to his childhood home. It is derelict. As he sits in silence, Time dissolves and ‘the crafty work begins’. Mary Rose has been described as a much darker companion to Peter Pan. Peter it will be remembered, would not grow up. Mary Rose cannot.