Real-life Drama of Peter and Alice

‘All children, except one, grow up,’ are the immortal words that begin J M Barrie’s enduring, dreamlike and magical children’s story Peter Pan. The words also have context, although a very different one, for international playwright John Logan’s play, Peter and Alice, for which Logan has personally granted Adelaide’s Independent Theatre the Australian Premiere this month, starring Will Cox and Pamela O’Grady.

Logan’s play is based on a meeting between 80-year-old Alice Liddell Hargreaves (1852-1934) and Peter Llewelyn Davies (1897-1960), a young man in his thirties. They had in common an amazing story. They were the people who, as youngsters, had been Lewis Carroll and J M Barrie’s inspirations for the children in Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

One might think this unlikely encounter between grown-up Alice and Peter was the stuff of fairy tales too, yet the meeting really did happen; at a Lewis Carroll exhibition in Bumpus’ Bookshop, London, in 1932.

The tale of the encounter between Alice and Peter didn’t end at that London bookshop, though; as every child knows, all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end and this was just the start. Let’s move forward to the middle of this tale, to a very different time when Peter and Alice were a long way from the minds of the incoming protagonists of the story.

During the early 1990’s Rob Croser and David Roach, driving forces behind Adelaide community theatre company Independent Theatre, attended Never The Sinner in London. It was a play by unknown young American playwright John Logan. In touch with Logan’s agent, Independent Theatre produced that play in Adelaide in 1992. A series of fortunate events meant Rob and David were to have their own fateful meeting with John, arranged in Chicago in 1993. So began a theatrical collaboration that endures to this day, with many of John Logan’s plays staged by Independent Theatre in Adelaide as Australian Premieres and one as a World Premiere.

In 1996, while staying for six weeks with Rob Croser and David Roach at their Glenelg home during one of these collaborations, John Logan began his own fairytale story. In Rob and David’s kitchen he received a call from, of all places, Hollywood. Oliver Stone wanted to make John’s screenplay, Any Given Sunday. When John left that day for the USA it was clear to Rob and David that the young playwright’s life would never be the same. Today John Logan is known world-wide for his plays, including Tony-Award-winning Red and screenplays such as for Gladiator, The Aviator, The Last Samurai, Sweeney Todd, Hugo and the latest James Bond film, Skyfall.

But this is a story about the 1932 meeting between Peter and Alice, you say. Well, it’s also a story about dreams and unlikely events and Rob and David’s home in Glenelg hadn’t finished as a venue for serendipity.

In 2004, while John stayed with them again, they were talking about various projects that interested them. John had been looking at the life of Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland.  Rob told John about what he called the other ‘dream children’ who had always fascinated him, namely the Llewellyn Davies boys, and their relationship with their foster parent, J M Barrie, which had led to the creation of Peter Pan.

In both instances the young children were placed under disturbing and extraordinary pressures by the authors, who were each brilliant but needy men. For Alice and Peter the focus on them meant they had to grow up too soon, yet the fantasy ‘dream children’ in the stories they inspired would stay forever young. What’s more, in the real lives of both Peter and Alice, tragedy played a perennial part.

John Logan had no knowledge of this story, until Rob Croser showed him material about it. Rob also mentioned a biography of Alice Liddell Hargreaves he’d read some years before and that a sentence from the biography had stopped him in his tracks. It was a sentence about that unlikely meeting as adults between the children who had inspired two of the most iconic books in the history of children’s literature.

At last everyone was on the same page and John Logan became enthralled by the idea of the Peter and Alice meeting. He immediately visited an Adelaide bookshop where he purchased copies of Peter Pan as well as a biography of J M Barrie. At that bookshop, not dissimilar to the London one in which Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn met in 1932, another chapter for the ‘dream children’ had begun.

The road for Logan’s eventual launch of his play Peter and Alice was long, but at last it premiered in London in 2013 and starred none other than Britain’s grand dame of theatre, Dame Judi Dench, as Alice and Skyfall’s Ben Wishaw as Peter.

Logan doesn’t back away from the sadness and tragedy behind Peter and Alice’s real lives. “Alice Liddell and the Davies boys were objects of obsessive love,” he said in a 2013 newspaper interview. “The relationship was always a melancholy one – those adults knew that the children, their muses, would grow up and leave them – and that sadness, to me, was the more significant dramatic point.”

Of Rob Croser, who directs Independent Theatre’s Australian Premiere of Peter and Alice this month in Adelaide, John Logan says, “I am particularly pleased and proud that Rob and Independent Theatre will be premiering the play in Australia. The idea has come back home.”

Now, all the story needs is an ending, and Adelaide audiences can be part of it by attending the intriguing production that is John Logan’s Peter and Alice. The play also happens to be Independent Theatre’s one hundredth production in its thirty years as an integral part of Adelaide’s theatre scene; another serendipitous event.

Lesley Reed

WHEN: Thursday-Saturday, August 21-23, 7.45 pm; Monday, August 25, 6.30 pm; Tuesday-Saturday, August 26-30, 7.45 pm; Saturday August 30, 2.15 pm.

VENUE: Space Theatre, Adelaide.

TICKETS: Adult $40.55; Concession $35.55; Student $23.25; Booked groups of 10+ $35.55 per ticket.

BOOKINGS: http://www.bass.net.au/events/peter-and-alice.aspx

Images: Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, in her 8oth year; the Llewellyn boys, whose father Arthur (pictured centre) and mother died young, leaving them with a foster father, the man who later wrote Peter Pan. Peter Llewellyn is the middle boy in the centre of the standing group in the second row; playwright John Logan, with Dame Judi Dench and Ben Wishaw, who starred in the London premiere of Peter and Alice, and rehearsal images of Independent Theatre's upcoming production.