Hannah,
Last night I finished reading the entire Peter and Alice play, and, in my opinion, it was bad! Finding Neverland level of bad!
I can’t list all of the inaccuracies and problems I have with this play because it would take too long, but I’ll list some:
* Saying George went to Oxford not Cambridge.
* Michael being the only main inspiration for Peter Pan not George too.
* Implying that Barrie met the first three boys when Peter was was a young boy and not just a baby.
* Barely mentioning George.
* Barely mentioning Sylvia.
* Barely mentioning Nico.
* Barrie writes to Arthur after his death not Sylvia.
* Made Barrie seem like he just used the boys as “bread and butter” and doesn’t really show that much how much he cared for them. Doesn’t show or tell how much the deaths of George and Michael affected him.
* I said this in my first post already, but the Barrie and Michael scene towards the end of play is super inaccurate and not true to the actual behaviors of both people!
* Peter mentions The Morgue, but the play takes place in 1932, and he definitely didn’t think about compiling that album yet!
* The play tries to show “bad sides” of Barrie, but they don’t mention Barrie sort of proposal to Sylvia after Arthur’s death or Jack’s negative feelings towards Barrie.
* Barrie forces a dying Arthur to say the boys are his now, which Barrie would never do!
I don’t know as much about the story behind Alice in Wonderland, but I knew enough to spot inaccuracies there too:
* Implying that Carroll was possibly a paedophile, which I believe he was not. Like Barrie, he was still friends with his child friends when they became adults.
* They only mention there being three Liddell sisters, but Alice was the fourth of ten children.
* Granted, it probably forever be a mystery why the friendship between Carroll and the Liddell family ended, but I don’t think it was for Carroll being attracted to Alice or to any of her other siblings.
* Peter and Alice talk about the deaths they’ve experienced in their lives but Alice doesn’t mention the death of her younger sister Edith when she was 22.
I also found the play unnecessarily dramatic a lot of the times, and there’s a lot of forced humor which me bores me and makes me cringe!
A lot of that forced humor comes from the characters of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, and I’m not sure what the purpose was for having them there because they switch around with being a part of Peter and Alice’s mind, to commentating in character about what’s going on in a scene, it’s just all over the place!
It really is a shame that this is so bad! This play came out in 2013, and this website was around for many years already, so, at least for the Peter/Barrie side if the of the story, they had a lot to go off of for their research and making Peter’s side of the story accurate, but for whatever reason, John Logan just didn’t! Or at least it seems he didn’t do enough research by just reading this play!
So I didn’t like the play at all, but I still want to hear your opinion and other people’s opinion on the forum!
The play is only 70 pages long, so it would only take an hour or two to read depending on your reading speed.