HOWZAT

“I see Neverland as a place between Earth and Heaven. It’s full of game-playing adventure but also menace,” says Dexter. “To see Hook as a dandyish buffoon is to rob him of his danger,” adds Anthony Head, who plays Peter’s piratical rival. “We’re aiming to balance the light and shade.” As the director and impresario Tyrone Guthrie observed: “Peter Pan should be played as delicate as a moth, as deadly as a bomb.”

P. J. Hogan’s lavish movie was shot in the studio so he had complete control of the film’s storybook visuals, a rich array of reds, greens and blues. On stage, Dexter sees Wendy’s nursery as also inhabiting a world of enchantment: “Here, after all, you have a dog as a nanny and Mrs Darling even capturing Peter’s shadow. Barrie wrote that the whole play should be seen through a child’s eyes.”

Yet the origins of Barrie’s play remain troublesome. The Little White Bird is a thinly disguised piece of wish-fulfilment in which Barrie works through his relationship with the eldest Llewellyn Davies child, George. There is an undressing, bath and bedtime sequence that today smacks of paedophile sexual fantasy.

Andrew Birkin, author of the memorable BBC TV trilogy The Lost Boys about the Llewellyn Davies children, believes that Barrie’s affection was innocent. Birkin knew the last surviving brother, Nico, who told him: “I never saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedophilia. Had he had either of these leanings, I would have been aware.”

Edwardian readers saw nothing untoward in The Little White Bird, just as they were not alarmed by Robert Baden-Powell’s delight in young men’s bodies and his desire to set up a scouting movement. He was obsessed by Barrie’s play and saw it many times — as did many adults, who made up the bulk of the play’s original audience.

Peter Pan’s premiere was at the Duke of York’s Theatre on December 27, 1904. The Times found it “a thing of pure delight; a delicious frolic”. It appealed to an expanding middle class that aspired to separate children’s mealtimes, well advertised toys and luxury gift books; they loved novels by the likes of E. Nesbit (The Railway Children), which assumed a safe nursery life as a base.

The play also belongs to a late-Victorian and Edwardian literature that worshipped eternal youth. “We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen,” says Wendy, as the Lost Boys look certain to walk the plank. All too soon the Rupert Brooke generation did indeed start dying like English gentlemen. George Llewellyn Davies was among the dead, now forever young; his brother Michael died at 20 while at Oxford, being taught to swim in a pool by a close friend.

Birkin has suggested that Peter is ageless like a ghost, perhaps even “the ghost of the lost brother that Barrie could never be, or the ghost of the son that he could never have”.

Birkin’s own Barrie project, The Letting Go, was delayed two years ago when his 20-year-old son Anno, due to play Michael Llewellyn Davies in the film, was killed in a car crash. Tragedy, it seems, haunts Barrie’s creation.

By the 1930s, Peter Pan had taken on the status of national myth. In Dream of Youth (1932), Wyndham Lewis writes of a Britain that has become a “vast communal nursery” populated by a generation of Pans. Yet nowadays children are so eager to grow up that one wonders if the play has more appeal for their nostalgic parents.

“I’ve seen it in my own daughters,” says Anthony Head. “One moment they want to be all grown-up, the next there’s this innocence in their eyes and the yearning for family security. That’s what the play shows. Neverland is fun but Wendy’s nursery is ultimately the place to come back to. Children can still relate to that.”

In the novel Barrie made out of his play, and in Trevor Nunn and John Caird’s version, last seen at the National Theatre in 1998, Wendy grows up. She can no longer fly and Peter takes her little daughter to Neverland instead. He is likely to go on doing so from generation to generation.

• Peter Pan runs from December 15 to March 7 at the Savoy, WC2 (0870-164 8787). P. J. Hogan’s movie is out on December 26