I only read "Peter Pan" and "When Wendy Grew Up" and...holy crap, the stage direction. The STAGE DIRECTION! How did the theatre people work with these scripts? How did the actors? These read like they should have been straight-up novels, not plays. I mean, the stage directions read like bits taken from a novel. Those poor production designers.

I didn't read all of these plays and I'm not certain that this is the edition, but the play I read was What Every Woman Knows. It was quite a clever story.

The Admirable Crichton: This play strikes me as a kind of cross between Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, with Wilde's wit and criticism of the upper classes, and Shaw's interest in sociology and human nature. The play's central concern is summed by Crichton: "Circumstances might alter cases." And each of the four acts gives us a different set of circumstances and a different case. The play begins in the home of Lord Loam, a peer with radical ideas about equality, who forces his family and servants to pretend to be equals once a month, including the very conservative butler Crichton. Crichton's conservatism is very interesting because it isn't rooted in an absolute preservation of the status quo, but a belief that hierarchies are naturally occurring, but the particular dispersal of authority changes based on the circumstances. This notion is put to the test when the family, Crichton, and a servant girl are marooned on an island when their yacht sinks. In act two, Crichton is still clearly a deferential servant, but he is also best adapted to island life, and his approach worries Lady Mary--who tries to get her father to assert his authority. In the third act, Crichton is unquestionably in charge, exercising an almost dictatorial power over everyone, who in turn behave with extreme deference. At the same time, Crichton has basically Gilligan's Islanded the place up, with electricity, a multitude of tools, etc. created out of virtually no resources. But at the end of act three, a ship arrives and rescues the castaways, bringing them back to London. There they uncomfortably resume their lives from act one, with Crichton as a constant reminder that the family's aristocratic position is entirely arbitrary and that they once behaved slavishly to a servant.
https://youtu.be/Rd6YP6-GU2c

Peter Pan: This is one of the most famous plays in the world, having been done in a number of well-known stage versions, teleplays, movies, and adaptations, including Barrie's own novel version. It tells the story of Peter Pan, a magical boy who takes three British children--Wendy, John, and Michael--to the enchanted Never Land, where they live in a kind of pseudo-family and have adventures with pirates, mermaids, wolves, and Native Americans (referred to in the stage directions with terms now regarded as racist).
What is most striking to me about this play is the instability of family structure. I mean, with Peter, Wendy, and the Lost Boys it makes some sense because they are children playing games. So when they all imagine Wendy is their mother, it's a game, though it also reflects a kind of real longing for home, protection, and the late Victorian/early Edwardian ideal of domesticity. But even the adults in the play don't seem to have a stable conception of family. At one point, Hook plans to kidnap Wendy and have her be the crew's mother (after executing the Lost Boys). I mean, these pirates are full grown adults, and they have the same conception as the Lost Boys that Wendy, a child, can in some meaningful sense be their mother. And in the first act of the play, Mr. Darling and Michael seem to be more like squabbling children of the same age than like father and son, while John plays at being his father and even exerts some authority over Mr. Darling. For a play centrally concerned with the questions of growing up and the role of family, the actual structure through which family operates here is remarkably arbitrary.
https://youtu.be/0lSPYfybtF8

When Wendy Grew Up: This is an exceptionally short work, just one scene long, which follows Peter Pan. Even though it's extremely short, it manages to highlight pretty much every fucked up thing about Peter as a character and about the play Peter Pan. For one thing, it highlights the fetishization of childhood--which is only debatably a bad thing--because Wendy is tormented by the fact that she has grown up in the many years since Peter has remembered to come get her for his Spring Cleaning, and Wendy tells her daughter Jane that she can no longer fly because "it is only the young and innocent that can fly." So Wendy is discarded by Peter basically because she has aged, which is, of course, a major problem in Western societies where older women are often devalued. Another major issue highlighted in the play is that Peter is self-centered and forgets pretty much everyone who ever matters to him. This is first brought up when Wendy describes how he's forgotten Tinker Bell; and Wendy gives a somewhat morbid description of her death. But this forgetfullness is more disturbing when Peter shows back up and Wendy mentions Captain Hook, whom Peter has forgotten. In an incredibly fucked up line, he says, "I forget them after I kill them." First off, that's no good as a general principle--but it highlights the stakes for remaining "young and innocent," which Peter is only able to do by erasing the awareness of how he mistreats others. It's also worth noting that Wendy only mentions Hook, but Peter uses the plural 'them' twice, suggesting that he repeatedly or even regularly kills and then forgets about it (though this acknowledgment suggests at least some level of remembering. And finally, the scene ends with Wendy letting Jane go with Peter to be his new mother and do his Spring Cleaning--and Wendy says that she had always been ready for Jane to take on this role, and that Wendy and Jane will wait for Peter, even though most years he doesn't come, and that someday Jane will have a daughter who will go with Peter to do his Cleaning. I mean, that's pretty disturbing. Wendy is basically committing her entire line of female descent to wait on a boy whose primary characteristic is his self-centeredness.
https://youtu.be/uZ5xYbVsNwI

What Every Woman Knows: This is a great Modern Drama satire, following in the feminist footsteps of plays like Ibsen's A Doll's House or Shaw's Mrs. Warren's profession. The story is about a "self-made" man who has in fact not made himself at all, but is so blinded by his own self-conception that he can't see it. The play begins with a family of Scottish granite merchants named the Wileys--very nouveau riche and still quite rough. They've bought a set of beautiful books that none of them reads, and when they catch a young student named John breaking into the house to read the books, the brothers and father offer him a bargain: they will pay for his education if at the end of five years he will marry their homely sister Maggie if she wants him. The young man accepts, and six years later he has embarked on a career in politics, getting elected to the Commons in his first run. John marries Maggie and begins a brilliant career as one of the Liberal Party's rising stars because of his brilliant turns of phrase in his speeches. However, John soon falls in love with Lady Sybil, a rather useless but charming socialite, and he determines to leave Maggie. Because Maggie knows he doesn't love her (i.e., Maggie), she agrees that she and John should split up after his big speech that could make him so indispensable to the Party that they'd overlook a divorce. So she arranges for John to go to the country for a few weeks to work on his speech, and then (without letting John or Sybil know) arranges for Sybil to go to the same cottage. When Maggie goes to the cottage to visit a few weeks later, John's political patron is dissatisfied with his speech, which is competent but lacks the distinctive wit. Maggie, meanwhile, has revised an earlier draft he had left at home, and when another friend gives that speech to the patron, he is thrilled with it. At the same time, John has realized that Sybil is quite boring and not much inspiration for him as a writer, and Sybil has found John increasingly dull. The revelation that the wit he's so known for comes from Maggie, turning his own strong political ideas into rhetorical masterpieces imminently depresses John, who is forced to confront the fact that he hasn't done everything in his career by himself--quite a blow to the male ego. But as Maggie tells him at the end, this is what women do for their men, allowing them the fantasy of being self-made while all the time working behind the scenes to help.
https://youtu.be/k0pyf6RQFQg

Mary Rose: I'm not really a fan of ghost stories (though I've gotten more into some horror movies and things over the past couple of years), and this is a rather creepy play. Interestingly, it deals with some similar themes to Peter Pan, namely the preservation of youth through a supernatural island--but whereas in Peter Pan it's ostensibly innocent and delightful, here it's distinctly menacing. The play opens with a young Australian soldier just after WWI touring the now vacant house in which he grew up. The caretaker reluctantly reveals that it's haunted, and when (at his request) she leaves to get him some tea, he experiences a kind of hallucination of the past. The house had been inhabited by a middle class family, including their daughter Mary Rose. When a young man named Simon asks to marry her, her parents reveal that when Mary Rose as eleven, they had been visiting the Hebrides and she had vanished from an island the locals believe is supernaturally menacing. She was gone for some twenty days before reappearing believing that only a few minutes had passes. Her parents never told her how long she had actually been gone. Four years after being married, Simon and Mary Rose go back to the island--her on a nostalgic trip and him on a kind of fact finding mission. While there, Mary Rose disappears again. The third act takes place twenty five years later, back in the family home. Simon returns from the sea and the parents give him a telegram, which announces that Mary Rose has returned and she is being brought back that very evening. When she arrives, it's clear that she has aged only an hour, although her parents and husband are a quarter century older. Apparently, Mary Rose then dies at some point, distraught because her child had grown up and run away to Australia--and become the Ozzy soldier who is now touring the house. Mary Rose's ghost appears to him, they converse, and in her final recognition that she's found the son she lost all those years ago, she is finally called to some kind of heavenly rest.
https://youtu.be/iprrTdJJc8o

Finally got to read the original play version of Peter Pan and I enjoyed it very much! I would love to see a production of this play instead of the musical sometime.

Only read Peter Pan (but also with so many editions of this story it’s hard to tell which are actually the 1920s play or the novel of another telling, so listing the full book).

Read for Uni assignment.

Peter Pan is one of the stories I didn't really love as a kid, and I still don't enjoy it now

Wow, Peter Pan is more complex and interesting than I thought, and it was a delight to find that Barrie had written 'The Admirable Crichton' which I didn't realise was a play.

Peter Pan: 04.05.15

I only read Peter Pan for university but I really liked it. Quick-paced, funny and somewhat tragic. The first play I've read and enjoyed (yes, this is a slight jab at Cursed Child and Othello, both of which I hated)

Also, a shutout to the insult 'cowardly custard' which I'm going to use because lol.

I read Peter Pan and When Wendy Grew Up to write the latest essay for my Children's Literature course. I am so glad I did. Having watched various versions of this over the years either in pantomime or on the screen (most memorably, the Disney animated feature, Hook and, on a related note, Finding Neverland), I still had never really paid much attention to the story and what it really meant.

This is one of the reasons I am particularly enjoying this last module of my Literature degree. It is giving me the opportunity to delve into those books and stories enjoyed as a child and think more about what they represent.

Peter Pan as a rtagic story, really. Whilst it is full of magic and excitement, it is also about accepting the process of growing up as inevitable and losing the magic but gaining something arguably more valuable: love. Peter is a boy refusing to grow up and in doing so, he is unable to feel as Wendy is starting to learn to feel, which I found to be very sad indeed. I loved reading the stage play version, especially since, as was required, in conjunction with the 2003 film directed by P J Hogan which is a fantastic version of the century-old story.

It was decent. I would recommend it for others.

These were such delightful plays. I was surprised they aren't in wider circulation.