![]() It lies behind ET (the kindly alien is partly Peter, and the kids' mother reads to them from Barrie's novelised version of the play), and in Hook he sentimentally deconstructed the play with a repressed Robin Williams discovering his inner child as Peter. Spielberg has been fascinated by Peter Pan. The project came to nothing and until now the cinema's direct confrontations with the play have been limited to Disney's 1953 cartoon (described at the time by The Observer's film critic CA Lejeune as 'a painful travesty'), and a sad Disney animated sequel last year. He was a good friend of Barrie's, though he'd been hurt by the playwright's charge that parts of The Kid were sentimental and whimsical (talk about pots and kettles). There was talk in the 1920s of Charlie Chaplin appearing in a silent film of Peter Pan. The best stage version I've seen since then was the RSC production of the 1980s that sought to desentimentalise the original text, added material that Barrie wrote later (including a epilogue in which the Lost Boys return home to become commuting City businessmen), and had a male Peter Pan in the robust form of Miles Anderson. I loved every minute, but I didn't shout out my belief in fairies when asked by Peter to save the life of Tinkerbell, and I kept on telling my mother that I could see the wires attached to the children's backs by Kirby's Flying Ballet, a theatrical predecessor of George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic. Nowadays, perhaps only small children can fully enter into the spirit of Peter Pan's curious mixture of pantomime and psychological drama and I was lucky enough at the age of six to see it with a cast of Alastair Sim (doubling as Mr Darling and Captain Hook), Zena Dare (Mrs Darling), the elfin 27-year-old Barbara Mullen as Peter and a seductively purring 20-year-old Joan Greenwood as Wendy. Frank Baum's novel, The Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. Peter Pan has embedded itself in our culture and, indeed, that of the world, in a manner matched only last century by the 1939 movie version of L. On the first night of the play in the West End, Barrie's friend, Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, left the Duke of York's theatre saying: 'Oh, for an hour of Herod!' but his feelings were not shared.
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