Peter & Alice

With its Australian Premiere of American playwright John Logan’s play Peter & Alice, Adelaide’s Independent Theatre had a lot to live up to following the launch of the play in London last year starring Dame Judi Dench. The company has risen to that challenge. Independent Theatre’s Peter & Alice is sublime; accomplished and absorbing.

The story investigates just what might have been discussed in the real life meeting that occurred between 80-year-old Alice Liddell Hargreaves and a young man, Peter Llewelyn Davies, during a Lewis Carroll exhibition in a London bookshop in 1932. After all, the two had something strangely in common. In their childhoods they’d each been the inspiration for the ‘dream children’ in the most famous children’s books of all time, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

 “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then”. This quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland has enormous significance when considering the two main characters in Peter & Alice. Each is trapped in a world that sometimes confuses and often blends the remembered and imagined times of childhood. They can’t escape past tragedies and also struggle to deal with the here and now, particularly Peter.

In John Logan’s own words, Peter & Alice has “come back home” in its Independent Theatre production, because it was while Logan was staying at Independent Theatre Artistic Director, Rob Croser’s house in Adelaide some years ago that the idea for the play was born.

Croser’s personal fascination with the 1932 London meeting between Peter Llewelyn Davies and Alice Liddell Hargreaves shows in his sensitive direction of Independent’s production and his casting is perfect.

In this 100^th production for Independent Theatre, Will Cox is controlled and totally believable as the troubled Peter Llewelyn Davies, a young man who, unlike his alter-ego Peter Pan, had to grow up far too soon. A superb performance.

As Alice Liddell Hargreaves, Pam O’Grady balances elderly Alice and the re-living of Alice’s wide-eyed, imaginative ten-year-old self with great skill, changing body language and voice as the story moves from the present into the past and back again.

David Roach is very fine as Peter Pan’s author, JM Barrie, guardian of Peter as a boy. Domenic Panuccio is equally good, demonstrating the unsettlingly obsessive nature of the attachment to young Alice that Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) appears to harbour.

Ben Francis is fantastic as the forever- young boy of fantasy, Peter Pan. He perches on a ladder or scampers about the stage, always optimistic and childishly simplistic in his view of the world. He provides a perfect contrast to adult Peter and epitomises a child’s outlook on life; that innocent time before we grow up. Ben Francis is a fine representative of the wealth of talent amongst Adelaide’s young actors.

Emma Bleby is also terrific in her role as Alice from Alice in Wonderland.  She is just as one imagines story-book Alice to be.

Laurence Croft demonstrates his great versatility in his multiple roles, as Arthur Llewelyn Davies and Michael Llewelyn Davies, but particularly as Alice Liddell’s besotted suitor and eventual husband Reginald Hargreaves.

The set is wonderful. A cosy backroom of Bumpus’ Bookshop in 1930’s London opens to reveal a world of colour, fantasy and memory into which the players occasionally venture. The only disappointment is that those in the audience seated at the edges of the auditorium cannot at times see the action at the very rear of the fantasy/memory part of the set, due to sightline issues.

Overall design, including sound and lighting is excellent, as are Pattie Atherton’s costumes and Sandra Davis’s white rabbit.

“All the world is made up of faith, and trust, and pixie dust,” is a memorable line from Peter Pan. The audience leaves John Logan’s latest play with much to contemplate about those words, about the fragile child in us all and that childhood experience can either centre us in life or leave us lost in Neverland.

Don’t miss Independent Theatre’s fine production of the poignant and intriguing story that is Peter & Alice.

Lesley Reed

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