Peter and Alice

In light of my recent reviews of Tiger Lily and Peter Pan, I decided that there was no time like the present to pick up John Logan's script for a play called Peter and Alice, about a meeting between the boy who gave his name to Peter Pan and the girl who gave her name to Alice in Wonderland, when both of them were adults.

As it happens, this meeting did actually occur in real life, although Logan's play is very much a work of fiction. Over the course of the play, which is a mixture of fantasy and reality, the two people are haunted by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), James Barrie, and the fictional versions of themselves, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. While this goes on, the "real" Peter and Alice discuss what it means to have been immortalized as children in works of fiction and their relationships with Carroll and Barrie, both controversial figures because of their bizarre relationships with young children. The dialogue is interspersed with quotations from Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, picked up by various characters in intriguing ways.

I would very much love to see a production of this play, and would've especially loved to see the production in London in 2013, which starred none other than Dame Judi Dench as Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Ben Whishaw as Peter Llewellyn Davies. The play is a great reframing of the actual lives behind iconic figures, and I can imagine that with actors of that calibre in the lead roles, it would be fascinating and moving to watch.

Highly recommended!