“Second turn to the right, and then straight on till morning.”
    Rare joy entered my life when I learned that Peter Pan, a great favourite of mine, was to be the class play and I was to be in it. That was the good news. The bad news was that my notions of the play were those of Disney, not J. M.  Barrie, and that I got to be one of the pirates. I only had two lines and I completely forgot both of them, stood in all the wrong places, and generally made a most unpiratic buccaneer. Peter Pan might never have grown up but that is the nature of the performing arts and all who sail in her.

 “Because I heard father and mother talking of what I was to be when I became a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun; so I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long time among the fairies.”

    J M Barrie’s Peter Pan was originally designed to be done in pantomime form, with emotional responses crudely elicited from the child audience. I’m not sure how or when I saw it but I distinctly remember the wandering light that everyone tried without the slightest success to convince me was a fairy called Tinkerbelle. I hated the whole thing, and didn’t yell—I seemed to take great pride in that. Yet, oddly, when confronted with Disney’s animated version, I was overwhelmed. I was Peter Pan, fighting the evil Captain Hook. And I absolutely loved the ticking crocodile. Theatre has never worked for me as well as the far more obvious illusion of cinema, even at animated level. Donald Duck was far more real to me than grown-ups, and taught me more about the world as well.