... and here's the rest.
When school ended in early December, Sylvia brought her boys up to London to visit Peter Pan in rehearsal. Barrie treated them like royalty, holding up the proceedings to let the boys fly about the stage, and introducing them to all concerned as being the real authors of the play. Their Uncle Gerald's first child, Angela, had been born earlier in the year, and Barrie celebrated her arrival by changing Wendy's third name to Angela. Further honours were extended to Michael: Alexander Darling became Michael Darling, with Nicholas added as a middle name so that all five boys should be represented among the Dramatis Personae.
The success of the production, however, was by no means assured; indeed, quite the reverse: most of the company were expecting a mild disaster. According to Barrie, "During the rehearsals of Peter [Pan] [...] a depressed man in overalls, carrying a mug of tea or a paint-box, used often to appear by my side in the shadowy stalls and say to me, "The gallery boys won't stand it." He then mysteriously faded away as if he were the theatre ghost." The cause for concern was not merely the bizarre nature of the play, so unlike anything that had ever been presented before; the opening night had been announced for December 22nd, but by mid-December the mechanical gear required for many of the special effects had not yet been installed, let alone rehearsed. Numerous elements from Barrie's original script had to be dropped at the eleventh hour. The “living” fairy, now renamed Tinker Bell, was to have been achieved by means of an actress moving behind a giant reducing lens, but the complications were too great; so was the flying eagle that was meant to lift the pirate Smee from the deck of the ship by the seat of his trousers and carry him off across the auditorium on a trapeze wire.
On December 21st, the night before the play was due to open, a mechanical lift collapsed, taking half the scenery with it. Dion Boucicault, who had worked himself almost to death, was forced to postpone the opening until 27th. The scenery for the final Kensington Gardens scene was still not finished, and as the stage hands refused to work over the Christmas holiday, Barrie was obliged to think again. he too was dangerously overworked, and was suffering appalling headaches as a result. Nevertheless he repaired to an empty dressing-room, axed the final twenty-two pages of the script, and spent most of Christmas Day rewriting what was by now the fifth revised ending.
Tuesday December 27th dawned clear and blue, but few of the Peter Pan company were up and about to see it. Most had limped home a few hours earlier after rehearsing all night, attempting to cover the interminable scenery changes with impromptu "front-cloth" scenes hastily written the day before. Since several of the changes were taking anything from 15 to 20 minutes, Gerald was asked to pad out the time by amusing the audience with ex tempore impressions of Henry Irving — a somewhat incongruous interlude coming in the middle of a fairy play. Barrie was now quite convinced that Beerbohm Tree's estimation of his sanity had been accurate. "The Greedy Dwarf" had been one thing, a hugely enjoyable amateur entertainment for children, but no more a contender for the West End stage than the Allahakbarries were for the Test Match. Peter Pan, however, was being staged before a highly sophisticated first-night audience, dressed up for the occasion and expecting to see a polished and professional play by one of the country's leading playwrights. "Do you believe in fairies?" cries Peter Pan in his effort to save Tinker Bell. "If you believe, wave your handkerchiefs and clap your hands!" The prospect of a bleak, embarrassed silence did not bear thinking about, and at the last moment Barrie took steps to insure against such an eventuality by arranging with the musical director, John Crook, that if there was no response to Peter's plea, the orchestra should down instruments and clap.
In these inauspicious circumstances, the curtain finally rose on J.M. Barrie's dream-child, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. the time was 8.30 p.m. — 3.30 p.m. in New York State, where an anxious Charles Frohman was awaiting the verdict at his home in White Plains. He had more than just a fortune invested in the play: it had become an infatuation, an obsession. Plans were already under way for the American production, and if its London precursor could yield the merest glimmer of evidence that Tree's advice had been wrong, he was prepared to risk the whole enterprise all over again on Broadway, with Maude Adams in the title role. Frohman's ordeal as he awaited the news out at White Plains with his friend Paul Potter was later recounted by his biographers:
It was a bitterly cold night, and a snow-storm was raging. Frohman's secretary in the office in New York had arranged to telephone the news of the play's reception which Lestocq [Frohman's London manager] was expected to cable from London. On account of the storm the message was delayed.
Frohman was nervous. He kept on saying, "Will it never come?" His heart was bound up in the fortunes of his beloved fairy play. While he waited with Potter, Frohman acted out the whole play, getting down on all fours to illustrate the dog and crocodile. he told it as Wendy would have told it, for Wendy was one of his favourites. Finally at midnight the telephone-bell rang. Potter took down the receiver. Frohman jumped up from his chair, saying, eagerly, "What's the verdict?" Potter listened a moment, then turned, and with beaming face repeated Lestocq's cablegram:
PETER PAN ALL RIGHT. LOOKS LIKE A BIG SUCCESS.
This was one of the happiest nights in Frohman's life.
Peter Pan all right" was an understatement characteristic of Lestocq, who, as Frohman's business manager, was primarily concerned with box-office takings. The cable intimated little of the thunderbolt that had struck the Duke of York's Theatre that night. For the past number of years, audiences had been subjected to a bombardment of "problem plays", concerned with social criticism and steeped in gloom. Barrie himself had attempted such a play with The Wedding Guest, and since Peter Pan had been wrapped in secrecy from the outset, few had any idea of what the author had in store for them. When the curtain rose to reveal a dog preparing a small boy for his bath, it was greeted in stunned silence — followed by a gasp of astonished delight. Fro the rest of the evening the audience succumbed as one to Barrie's spell: the elite of London's society, with few children among them, emulated Sentimental Tommy by "flinging off the years and whistling childhood back". The audience were not the only ones to be taken unawares: the entire company, bleary-eyed and exhausted, were as astonished as anyone else by the reception they received. When Nina Boucicault turned to the distinguished gathering and begged their belief in fairies, the response was so overwhelming that she burst into tears.
Peter's character is a delicate balance between the mortal and the immortal in his being — "Poor little half-and-half", Old Solomon Caw calls him in The Little White Bird. He is not a fairy, like Puck or Ariel, but a "tragic boy", who seems to be perpetually engulfed by an immense sense of loneliness that stems from the mortal in him. Thousands of actresses have played Peter Pan, but, judging by contemporary evidence, few have caught his enigma with such exquisite perfection as did Nina Boucicault. Denis Mackail as a boy of twelve saw her performance:
Miss Nina Boucicault as Peter Pan [...] The best, as no one has ever questioned, because of this haunting, eerie quality, this magic, and this sadness which is a kind of beauty too. others will be more boyish, or more principal-boyish, or gayer and prettier, or mor sinister and inhuman, or more ingeniously and painstakingly elfin [...] But Miss Boucicault was the Peter of all Peters [...] She was unearthly but she was real. She obtruded neither sex nor sexlessness, which has so far beaten everyone else. Above all she had the touch of heart-breaking tragedy that is there in the story or fable from beginning to end; yet she never seemed to know it [...] Barrie, lucky in so many of his actresses, was never luckier than here.
The first night concluded with numerous curtain-calls, though inevitable there were a few dissenters to the general enthusiasm. The writer Anthony Hope found the sight of the Beautiful Mothers adopting the Lost Boys too much to stomach, and groaned aloud, "Oh, for an hour of Herod!" while the musical-comedy impresario George Edwardes was heard to mutter, "Well, if that's the sort of thing the public wants, I suppose we'll have to give it ’em." The critics, however, were more generous. The Daily Telegraph observed that the play was "so true, so natural, so touching that it brought the audience to the writer's feet and held them captive there." "To our taste," wrote A.B. Walkley in The Times, "Peter Pan is from beginning to end a thing of pure delight." Beerbohm Tree's half-brother, Max Beerbohm, paid Barrie a perceptive though somewhat back-handed compliment in The Saturday Review:
Undoubtedly, Peter Pan is the best thing[Barrie] has done — the thing most directly from within himself. Here, at last, we see his talent in its full maturity; for here he has stripped off from himself the last flimsy remnants of a pretence to maturity [...]
Mr Barrie is not that rare creature, a man of genius. He is something even more rare — a child who, by some divine grace, can express through an artistic medium the childishness that is in him [...] Mr Barrie has never grown up. He is still a child, absolutely. But some fairy once waved a wand over him, and changed him from a dear little boy into a dear little girl.
Bernard Shaw went so far as to proclaim that Peter Pan was an artificial freak which missed its mark completely, and was "foisted on children by the grown-ups". The play may have missed its mark on Shaw, but for the vast majority of children who trooped to see it, Barrie scored a bull's-eye on their aspirations. peter Pan was the first of the pre-teen heroes: girls wanted to mother him, boys wanted to fight by his side, while the ambiguity of his sex stimulated a confusion of emotional responses. The play soon began to attract a hard-core following of matinee fanatics who occupied the front row of the stalls to hurl thimbles at Peter and abuse Hook. Daphne du Maurier wrote of her father's performance:
When Hook first paced his quarter-deck in the year 1904, children were carried screaming from the stalls [...] How he was hated, with his flourish, his poses, his dreaded diabolical smile! That ashen face, those blood-red lips, the long, dank, greasy curls; the sardonic laugh, the maniacal scream, the appalling courtesy of his gestures; [...] There was no peace in those days until the monster was destroyed, and the fight upon the pirate ship was a fight to the death.
Pre-eminent among Peter's fans were the boys who had started it all. After spending Christmas at Berkhamsted, they came up to London and went to the play with Barrie's friend, the writer E.V. Lucas, his wife Elizabeth and their six-year-old daughter, Audrey. In 1939 Audrey recalled:
I went [...] to the first matinee [...] with George, Jack, peter, and Michael Llewelyn Davies (Nicholas being too young), and so imposing in size was our party that we drove to the theatre in one of those private buses which used to be hired by large families to take themselves and their luggage to railway stations. We sat in a box, in two more likely, and we loved the play [...] Hook had become one of us, the Jolly Roger had cast its spell, Smee was to become a household word, to fly a burning ambition. On the way home George demonstrated his excited approval by pretending to fall out of the bus.
The Davieses went back to Leinster Corner for tea, then returned home to the country, leaving the author alone with his wife. Barrie and Mary rarely communicated with each other these days, and any reflections that Barrie might have had on the triumph of Peter Pan were kept to himself. What was his mood, as he paced up and down his study, contemplating his success? Was he, like Frohman, elated? Perhaps his own description of Captain Hook best described him:
Hook trod the deck in thought. O man unfathomable. It was his hour of triumph, [...] and knowing as we do how vain a tabernacle is man, could we be surprised if he [was] [...] bellied out by the winds of his success? But here was no elation in his gait, which kept pace with the action of his sombre mind. Hook was profoundly dejected. He was often thus when communing with himself [...] in the quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone.
When Barrie wrote his Dedication to the five Davies boys in 1928, he expressed a further reason for his dejection:
I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. I am sometimes asked who and what Peter is, but that is all he is, the spark I got from you.
What a game we had of Peter before we clipped him small to make him fit the boards. He was the longest story on earth, and some of you were not born when that story began and yet were hefty figures before we all saw that the game was up. Do you remember a walled garden at Burpham, and the initiation thereat of Michael when he was six weeks old, and three of you grudged letting him in so young? Have you, Peter, forgotten Tilford, and your cry to the Gods, "Do I just kill one pirate all the time?" do you remember Marooners' Hut in the haunted groves of Black Lake, and the St Bernard dog in a tiger's mask who so frequently attacked you, and the literary record of that summer, The Boy Castaways, which is so much the best and the rarest of this author's works? What was it that eventually made us give to the public in the thin form of a play that which had been woven for ourselves alone? Alas, I know what it was, I was losing my grip. One by one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the tree of knowledge. Sometimes you swung back into the wood, as the unthinking may take a familiar road that no longer leads to home; or you perched ostentatiously on its boughs to please me, pretending that you still belonged; soon you knew it only as the vanished wood, for it vanishes if one needs to look for it. A time came when I saw that George, the most gallant of you all, ceased to believe that he was ploughing woods incarnadine, and with an apologetic eye for me derided the lingering faith of Jack; when even peter questioned gloomily whether he did not really spend his nights in bed. There were still two who knew no better, but their day was dawning. In these circumstances, I suppose, was begun the writing of the play of Peter, so much the most insignificant part of him. That was a quarter of a century ago, and I clutch my brows in vain to remember whether it was a last desperate throw to retain the five of you for a little longer, or merely a cold decision to turn you into bread and butter [...] you had played it until you tired of it and tossed it in the air and gored it and left it derelict in the mud and went on your way singing other songs; and then I stole back and sewed some of the gory fragments together with a pen-nib [...] I talk of dedicating the play to you, but how can I prove it is mine? How ought I to act if some other hand thinks it worth while to contest the cold rights? Cold indeed they are to me now, and Peter is as far away in the woods as that laughter of yours in which he came into being long before he was caught and written down [...] There is Peter still, but to me he lies sunk in that gay Black Lake.
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