When Alice (Wonderland) met Peter (Pan)

Charlie Rowe and Henry Goodman star as Ronnie and Arthur Winslow in "The Winslow Boy," Terence Rattigan's 1946 play is based on a celebrated Edwardian court case, in London.
Judi Dench as Alice Liddell Hargreaves in "Peter and Alice," based on a meeting between the people who inspired "Alice in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan," in London.

LONDON -- When Alice in Wonderland met Peter Pan, she was a cantankerous old lady and he a gloomy dipsomaniac.

The play "Peter and Alice" by John Logan, now at London's Noel Coward Theatre, is based on this real encounter in 1932 between 80 year-old Alice Liddell Hargreaves (Judi Dench) and 35 year-old Peter Llewelyn Davies (Ben Wishaw).

Hargreaves had inspired Lewis Carroll's famous children's books. Davies had been one of the sources of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Their lives were constantly shadowed by fictional versions of themselves. It was the meeting of two myths.

Logan ("Skyfall") opens his story in a musty office. Hargreaves walks with a stick, and says words like "presumptuous" with hauteur. Davies is a shambolic literary type, bearded and gangly.

Suddenly the office morphs into a fantastical Victorian toy theater with stylized props. When Lewis Carroll (Nicholas Farrell) appears, Hargreaves loses her limp and skips like a schoolgirl. J.M. Barrie (Derek Riddell) turns up and Davies behaves like a boy with him.



That's a heck of a lot of commentary. In fact there's so much narration that there's no room for a plot or conflict.

Yet the ability of Dench and Wishaw to change from children to adults is so compelling that their talents draw you in.

There's nothing twee when Dench becomes a little girl; you can see the seeds of the older bossy matriarch in her. Wishaw is a painfully vulnerable boy, until Barrie brings him out of himself with adventure stories and laughter.

Michael Grandage directs the 90-minute show with customary fluidity, and Christopher Oram's toy-theater set is charming. It makes the evening pleasant; it doesn't make Logan's play a masterpiece.

Terence Rattigan's 1946 hit "The Winslow Boy," based on a real Edwardian legal battle, gets a reliably entertaining new production at the Old Vic.



Rattigan's play takes a while to get going (Anthony Asquith's superb 1948 movie of the play contains much sensible trimming), and the early scenes of family life meander.

