Peter Pan: Welsh National Opera, review: 'An exhausting romp'

This flat-footed operatic adaptation of JM Barrie's classic won't do Peter Pan's reputation any favours, says Rupert Christiansen

Richard Ayres's adaptation of Peter Pan
Richard Ayres's adaptation of Peter Pan

Disneyfied and transferred to Broadway, balleticised on ice, laid out on the psychoanalyst’s couch and marketed as a brand of peanut butter, Peter Pan has weathered many indignities over a century of being the boy who never grew up.

Such is the rich suggestiveness in the myth that despite competition from Roald Dahl and Harry Potter, the magic of his name will surely continue to resonate. But this flat-footed operatic adaptation will not do his reputation any favours.

J M Barrie wrote several versions of the story. The composer Richard Ayres and librettist Lavinia Greenlaw have cut and spliced them, keeping to the familiar narrative outline, but setting such a helter-skelter pace (a duration of barely a hundred minutes) that there is no chance for anything but bare plot to establish itself.

The dynamics of the Darlings’ marriage, Peter’s conflicted nature, Wendy’s home-making, Tinkerbell’s impish role, and the crew of Captain Hook’s pirate brig are scarcely touched on. Given the loss of these dimensions, the deeper poetic power and mystery of the drama dissipates, leaving us without any sense of a child’s vision of the world, with its half-understood anxieties and longings, its ability to mirror play and reality, its ambivalent desire to escape conscience and yet to remain secure in the family.

“I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m the bird that has broken out of the egg,” cries Peter when Hook asks him to explain himself – a line, sadly excised here,which could have been the springboard for some wonderful music.

What is left is an exhausting romp that never touches the heart or charms the imagination. Ayres’s tumultuous score, heavily in thrall to Janaček in general and The Cunning Little Vixen in particular, is giddily exuberant and nervously volatile to the point of being manic – you could say, in its defence, that its uninhibited brassy rowdiness reflects an aspect of Peter Pan’s inner life. But where were the other aspects?

The singers aren’t given much to chew on. Although Iestyn Morris’s counter-tenor Peter had some panache and aerial grace, Marie Arnet could only make a pallid impression as Wendy. Ashley Holland showed flashes of authentic pantomime gusto doubling as Mr Darling and Captain Hook, and Hilary Summers’s Mrs Darling coped in matronly fashion with some of the score’s gentler, more lyrical passages. Erik Nielsen was the very capable conductor.

But Keith Warner’s staging, clumsily designed by Jason Southgate, is an awful mess. Much too dark and gloomy, it half-suggests that Neverland is situated in the Darlings’ nursery and pointlessly turns Hook’s ship into a railway carriage, thus missing several points. Children will not find the show easy to follow or engaging – nor did I – and I can’t recommend it.

Box office: 029 2063 6464 www.wno.org.uk

At the Wales Millennium Centre until 31 May; then Hippodrome, Birmingham (0844 338 5000), 11 June, and Royal Opera House,WC2 (020 7304 4000), 24 and 25 July