Following Wendy

Peter Pan meets Skins in this dark, brooding interpretation of JM Barrie’s classic tale. Transposed to 2010, Wendy Darling is no longer a mild-mannered Edwardian schoolgirl but an attractive, independent young woman with a free gaff, and an enigmatic new man in her life.

If Disney’s sunny animated 1953 version is your Peter Pan benchmark, prepare to be shocked. Instead of innocent Technicolor japery we’re treated to booze-soaked house parties, Wendy’s disappearance with Peter, glassy-eyed suitors (Sebastian, the play’s only new addition to the original cast), police interrogations (Sebastian, again), and, of course, Neverland with its quotient of pirates, Indians and fairies.

This is a colourful, visually inventive piece of theatre. Characters, many in full Lost Boys regalia, vanish through one side door only to reappear moments later through another, as the gloomy corners and breezeblock walls of a dank cellar on Chambers street are expertly exploited to give the drama a suitably turbid, macabre hue. All the while the play’s significant physical demands are met with effortless grace by a uniformly excellent cast.

Reimagining a children’s favourite to explore themes of rejection and grief proves an inspired move. Peter Pan and Tinkerbell’s childish iterations ("a girl is worth 20 boys", is one of the unnerving pair’s favourites) quickly lose their puckishness as the darkness at the play’s heart comes to the fore.

It is only when the overlapping narratives are spliced together a little too forcefully at the close that Following Wendy’s magical spell is broken. But maybe that’s the point: adolescent life, after all, is no fairy story.