PC Peter

Went to the National Theatre film of its Peter Pan, which was really even worse than the total shambles it made of Treasure Island last year.  They have absolutely no idea - no, they have ideas, deeply misguided ones, that they impose on the text, and absolutely refuse to allow the work to speak for itself.  They remove from Pan, for example, both the sentimentality and the viciousness.

When you come to think of it, the classic Pan, where Mr. Darling doubles Captain Hook, is a pretty close approximation to the Oedipus story; Peter kills the father (Hook) and marries the mother (Wendy).  But you have to leave the quirk in. The national had the mother as Hook, which would require a much more thorough rewrite; had Tinkerbell as a gay clown - can't imagine who clapped for her/him; had the father also double as a lost boy - in fact, they screwed with every carefully mined apposition - age, sex, class - that  make up the witches' brew that is Peter Pan (I find that nobody ever remembers that bit about Peter thinning out the lost boys if they started to grow; much more like the later vampire movie than the Disney).

OK, am I wrong? The Guardian review says

[The Director's] latest ruse is inspired by JM Barrie’s original concept for the staged version of Peter Pan, which first premiered in 1904, although Barrie didn’t publish a script until the late 1920s (because he kept altering it). Barrie always intended that the roles of Mrs Darling and Hook be played by the same person, even though he never achieved this in any of the productions he staged. “Barrie wanted the actress playing Mrs Darling to double up as Hook because Hook is Peter’s nemesis and his arch enemy is really the mother figure.”

“Peter was rejected as a tiny infant by his own mother. We learn about that in [the 1906 novel] Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. There’s a chapter where we find out that his nursery room has bars and he has been denied access to his mother. This provides the emotional essence of the story. If Hook is a man you don’t get that ‘mother figure’ theme running through the story, which is hugely important to the piece.” 

I'm going to have to check that.

The Independent mentions that 

there’s an interpolation from the later story Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens that goes some way towards explaining

Peter's dislike of mothers, and that I would certainly have accepted without demur. 

And then there's this:

There were odd stories about him; as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened. 

That would be quite a treatment. Rather like Gaiman's Death. 

and...

Barrie contemplated naming the story "The Boy Who Hated Mothers", and tried to have the actress playing Mrs Darling double with Captain Hook (Barrie himself remarked, "There is the touch of the feminine in Hook, as in all the greatest pirates). In a remarkable moment in Peter and Wendy, the narrator declares that he despises Mrs Darling; a little later, he says that he likes her best of all. Out of such idiosyncratic, rapid switches of feeling, this classic draws its life.

All right, I have to buy The Annotated Peter Pan.