Peter Pan and Wendy

December 2004 marked the centenary of the opening performance of J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, the first undisputed major classic of children’s theatre, and still perhaps the only one. Barrie’s novelised version of his story, Peter Pan and Wendy, was not published until 1911, so this ‘Centenary Edition’ is strictly speaking premature. But that hardly matters, because ‘the play’s the thing’, and the prose version, although a classic also in its way, cannot match Peter on the stage. As editions of both have multiplied, and Peter Pan remains an endlessly popular living text, its century of life has been marked by a series of illustrators, from F D Bedford’s original ethereal decorations, still influenced by the pre-Raphaelites, to Paula Rego’s sinister paintings for the 1992 Folio Society edition, which perhaps reach the extreme in loss of innocence. Rego does not do innocence, or indeed childhood. Her children are precocious and cynical, yet also trapped and abused, mini-adults.

Ingpen’s illustrations are a wonderful corrective, true to Barrie and yet thoroughly modern, appropriate to Ingpen’s Dreamkeeper, who ‘lives in the world… where reality is an intruder and dreams, both good and bad, come true’. Ingpen shows himself a marvellous keeper of Barrie’s dreams. His endpapers and some other pages are effectively sheets from a sketchbook, showing many possible Peters, many pirates, many Lost Boys. His Peter always has the traditional tunic of woven leaves, always a distinctive skull-cap, and he is always small and young; but he has several faces, some sharper, sadder and wiser than others. You take your choice. Ingpen has picked up Barrie’s realisation that every child has a unique Neverland, and made from it a truly beautiful set of illustrations, full of humour, glamour, mischief, and a dancelike movement and energy. They celebrate imagination as the play and novel do. I doubt if Barrie’s immortal creation has ever been better served by an artist.