Peter Pan review: Captain Hook steals the show as Roddy Doyle adds a Dublin flavour
Clare Dunne as Captain Hook in Peter Pan, at the Gate. Photo: Ros Kavanagh
- Peter Pan
- Gate Theatre, Dublin
- ★★★☆☆
There are Christmas plays, and there are pantos, and never the twain meet. Except perhaps this year at the Gate Theatre, where Peter Pan’s best moments are when Roddy Doyle’s new version is most like a pantomime, usually courtesy of the brilliant Clare Dunne as Captain Hook.
Perhaps they should have called this revamp after the villain. Oh wait, Spielberg got there first. Nevertheless, it’s Dunne’s show, as she struts her stuff as an irresistibly sardonic, vainglorious, self-pitying Hook, by turns exasperated by her hapless henchmen, and terrified by the crocodile for whom she’s fated to end up as lunch.
In Doyle’s retelling, we get to Neverland via northside Dublin, with the Darlings living not in Kensington, but in a Georgian townhouse on, perhaps, Eccles Street. As Doyle imagines in his programme note, this is the story of Peader O Phain, who, after leaving his “hidey hole in the Phoenix Park … got caught in a crosswind half a mile over Arnott’s” and wound up in London telling JM Barrie his story.
This, unfortunately, is as impish and spirited as Doyle’s writing here gets. His relocation to Dublin remains superficial: an “ah, here” or two, plenty of inexplicably dropped Ts from the Darlings, who have working-class accents, and, somehow, servants, and a few local gags are about the height of it. Doyle’s doubling of Mrs Darling with Captain Hook, a part usually taken by Mr Darling, and Wendy Darling’s emergence as a surrogate mother to the Lost Boys add interesting, if ultimately unexplored, textures, while Wendy’s bond with Peter feels lopsided.
Katie Davenport's costumes and Niall McKeever’s set chime nicely in their evocation of Neverland’s childish anarchy, coloured as if by an explosion of powder paints, and evoking the garishness of 1980s kids’ TV, crossed with certain pop music videos of the same decade.
Liam Bixby makes for a cocky, strutting Peter Pan. His boy who refuses to grow up is suitably untouched by self doubt.
This first night was delayed for almost a week due to what the theatre said were the play’s “ambition” and “intricate and technical nature”. The plethora of sound, stage and lighting technicians credited attest to that, and their work adds much delight throughout. But the most effective moments under Ned Bennett’s direction have a more knockabout flavour, with low-tech puppetry, Lost Boy rough and tumble, and witty shadow play standing out.
There’s plenty of energy in Bennett’s staging, compensating somewhat for the nagging lack of momentum in Doyle’s retelling. But happily, the occasional longueurs are always alleviated as soon as the wonderful Dunne appears.
- Until January 14
