Inspired by the 1932 encounter between 80 year old Alice Liddell Hargreaves and 35 year old Peter Llewellyn-Davies, the real life ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Peter Pan’, John Logan sets out to write a play. Fresh off the back of the successful Skyfall, Michael Grandage directing, Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw limbered up and ready to go. It would seem a safe bet putting fifty quid on the chances that the product would be anything less than mind-blowing.
Somewhere amid the promising process outlined above, Logan devastatingly appears to have adopted the motto ‘why say one word when you can say 25?’ Peter & Alice is burdened with a weight of dialogue that threatens to stifle at every turn. One doesn’t hesitate to forgive the occasional stumble of the usually flawless Dench and Whishaw but questions why on earth the leaden high dialogue had to be there in the first place.
There is an inevitable tragedy surrounding this story of an effervescent elderly woman who embraces her fictional counterpart and is reflecting on her life, and the haggard, prematurely aged man who, ever plagued by his, cuts his life short by throwing himself under a train at Sloane Square station. It is the dynamite subject matter that makes Peter & Alice so vexing as it veers into a banal sludge of confused memories, shoehorned parallels between two only partially similar lives, and strange, unflattering appearances from Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie. There is a grating, inescapable sense that this play is has been rushed to the stage a few drafts off completion.
The difference in tone is palpably lacking as we swerve from the Wonder/Never Land fantasising to the Peter and Alice who encounter each other in a bookshop. The stagnant tone could be a reflection of two characters who are forever immortalised, though if this be so, it isn’t executed in the most compelling manner. It would have been nice to feel just a little more of the larger than life escapism which was obviously being aimed at, more of the lurid, grotesqueness of the fictional lands that we can recall imagining in their own childhoods. There is little room for imagination as all details are articulated to a point of excess, and it’s clear that director Grandage’s hands have been tied from the off.
As the curtain falls on the faded gaudiness of the Victorian children’s theatre and we are returned to the dusty bookshop where Peter & Alice encounter each other for the first and last time, the truly frustrating tragedy sets in as you realises how good the last 90 minutes could have been. 2/5
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