Wendy & Peter Pan, Barbican review – Bleak and beautiful, but more suited to misty-eyed adults than actual kids

Peter Pan is never short on darkness. With its child-hating Captain Hook, ominously skulking crocodile, and wistful musings on the pains of growing up, there is plenty of grime beneath the fairy dust. Even so, playwright Ella Hickson’s rewrite feels strikingly bleak. It was first staged in 2013 in Stratford-upon-Avon, thrilling the RSC’s audiences with its grief-soaked meditations on mortality. Now, it's getting a belated London premiere at the Barbican, offering a fascinating, feminist riff on a classic – albeit one that’s more suited to misty-eyed adults than actual kids.

Banish all memories of Nana, the lovable Newfoundland dog who raises the Darling family’s three children in JM Barrie’s original play. Hickson has sent Nana, tail between her legs, to the pound and created a new character in her place: Tom, an impish little boy who dies from a sudden illness. It’s an ingenious reference to Barrie’s own older brother, whose early death coloured his story of a boy who never grows up. But it does bring an almost overwhelming heaviness to these slow-moving early scenes: Lolita Chakrabarti makes a rare return to the stage as their grieving mother, offering a sedate counterpoint to Toby Stephens’s delightfully jovial antics as Mr Darling.

The gloom takes a while to dispel. When Daniel Krikler’s Peter Pan crashes through the window, Hannah Saxby’s awkward, prickly Wendy isn’t enchanted – she’s suspicious. “It’s creepy,” she says, justly wary of this strange boy lurking outside her bedroom. Likewise, when he spirits her off to Neverland, she’s not enchanted – she’s enlisted into a life she didn’t ask for, forced to mother and feed its lost boys. Wendy struggles to articulate her anger and her feelings of being overwhelmed, sounding more like a thirtysomething working mum than a tweenager in a magical land. And when she does talk about her experiences, she gets mocked as “moany” and “whiny” – while Peter Pan floats off on adventures, incapable of taking responsibility for his own actions.

Hickson’s approach is an intelligent, contemporary way of refocusing this story. But it’s also a welcome relief when Wendy finally finds her inner adventurer in this play’s punchier second half. Jonathan Munby’s production feels far more confident in the classic Peter Pan territory of swashbuckling sword fights and dastardly pirates, with Stephens bringing all the cut-glass accented, camp villainy you could hope for to the role of Hook. And Colin Richmond’s already-gorgeous design attains new heights, too, creating a skull-fronted pirate ship that’s packed to the brim with squabbling seafarers battling for their lives on the high seas.

Hickson is unafraid to show the stakes here. She kills off more characters than many Shakespeare tragedies, proving that Neverland isn’t an escape from the real world – it’s a dark echo of it, where power dynamics can be seen with new clarity. And despite the odd silly joke about literal poo sticks or “rizz”, this adaptation has much more to say about adult relationships than childhood ones. There’s plenty to intrigue its audiences over its overly long two-hour-45-minute runtime – though sadly without offering them that soaring sense of wonder that’s made Peter Pan immortal.

On at The Barbican until 22 November 2025; tickets and information here