Peter Panic

Responses to the London riots have been many and varied. Politicians and playwrights have sought to understand or to condemn, or sometimes both. The Guardian has attempted to read the riots; companies like the Tricycle Theatre have sought to tell the rioters' stories. None has provided so gripping and disturbing an artistic response as James Baldwin's Peter Panic, performed here with brutal conviction by its cast of three.

Baldwin transposes the image of a lost and angry generation onto JM Barrie's most famous literary creation, placing Peter Pan as the adopted son of Wendy and her Prime Minister husband in a London on the brink of collapse. Lost boys and girls rip apart the institutions of a state and society which has begun to see its children as a threat and a burden, and which has outlawed their creation. Incredibly, it's a dystopia which feels alarmingly real, Baldwin presenting us with a household gripping onto mutilated standards of decorum as society heaves in violent motion. In this Neverland, the eternally youthful but sexually aggressive Peter provides a locus for exploring the darkest psychological resources of Barrie's invention.

At times, Baldwin's script veers dangerously close to telling rather than showing, odd moments of heavy explanatory monologue proving not nearly as effective as the loaded dialogue. Fortunately, this is a remarkable cast, cleverly directed, and those prosier passages are dealt the lightest touch, while the subtext of the revealing exchanges is allowed to sing. In the end, it takes the terrible act of a feral child to show that, in escaping a world which is the product of adults' rules, death is necessarily the greatest adventure.