Highly watchable: Judi Dench
Dench and Whishaw play Alice and Peter.
Alice Liddell-Hargreaves was Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for Alice In Wonderland.
Peter Llewelyn Davies was J.M. Barrie’s muse for Peter Pan.
Playwright Logan learned that the elderly Alice and the adult Peter once met — in a London bookshop in 1932.
He imagines what they might have said to each other.
What was it like to have inspired two such well-known children’s stories? Did it send them round the bend?
Dame Judi is almost Queen Motherly these days, highly watchable.
Mr Whishaw is so sensitive, so irredeemably moist, that he could do with sponging.
Logan’s play is inevitably a bit doom-laden. Is there not something intrinsically sad when we look back at childhood, even if we have been reared in happy families (which poor Peter was not)?
Clergyman Carroll (Nicholas Farrell) is presented as a chaste pederast. We meet a slightly cruel Barrie (Derek Riddell) as well as the fictitious Alice (Ruby Bentall, who mispronounces ‘Cheshire cat’) and Peter Pan (a fey turn from Olly Alexander).