Peter Pan (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up, stepped onto a London stage on the 27th of December 1904 at the Duke of York's Theatre, and he has never quite left. Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie created him, and the question that haunts every version of the story is deceptively simple: why would a child choose to stay a child forever?

  The answer Barrie gave was not a cheerful one. Peter is forgetful and self-centred. He rules a band of lost boys on a mythical island called Neverland, fights pirates, and befriends fairies. But he is also described as an exaggerated stereotype of a boastful and careless boy. He claims greatness even when the claims are questionable. He congratulates himself when Wendy re-attaches his shadow.

  Barrie planted the character even earlier, in a 1902 novel for adults called The Little White Bird, where Peter is a seven-day-old baby who has flown from his nursery to Kensington Gardens. That infant would become a stage sensation, a Disney icon, a postage stamp, and a psychological syndrome. The path from seven-day-old baby to global cultural emblem is a stranger journey than even the flight to Neverland. It is the journey this documentary will trace.

• 2. The Man Behind the Boy

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  Barrie drew Peter Pan from grief as much as from imagination. His older brother David died in an ice-skating accident the day before his 14th birthday, and both his mother and Barrie himself came to think of David as forever a boy. That frozen-in-time quality is the emotional engine of the whole character.

  A second source arrived through friendship. Barrie described his relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys in his Dedication to the first edition of the play: "I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produced a flame. That is all he is, the spark I got from you."

  Mr. Darling, one of the parents in the story, is named after George Llewelyn Davies, and Mrs. Darling is named after Mary Ansell, Barrie's own wife. The characters in the nursery were drawn from life. Psychologist Rosalind Ridley has written that by comparing Peter's behaviour to adults and to other animals, Barrie raises post-Darwinian questions about the origins of human nature. Peter can be read as Barrie's memory of himself as a child: charmingly childlike and childishly solipsistic at once.

  Peter's name and his habit of playing the flute or pan pipes connect him to the Greek god Pan, the nature deity of wild things. That mythological undercurrent sits just below the surface of a story that is also, unmistakably, about a specific Edwardian childhood and a specific act of loss.

• 3. A Boy Who Cannot Be Touched

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  Barrie never described Peter's appearance in detail, leaving it to the imagination of every reader and every adapter. In the original play, Peter's outfit is made of autumn leaves and cobwebs, and in Peter and Wendy Barrie describes him as "a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees". He still had all his first teeth.

  The original productions in the UK put Peter in a reddish tunic and dark green tights. Nina Boucicault wore that costume in 1904; it is now exhibited at Barrie's Birthplace. Pauline Chase, who played the role from 1906 to 1913, wore a similar costume that is displayed in the Museum of London. Traditionally the character has been played on stage by a female actor, though a male actor may also take the role.

  From the 1920s onward, a green costume became more common, and the tendency accelerated after Disney's animated film. The original play contains a stage direction that is easy to overlook: no one must ever touch Peter. He does not know why this rule exists. When Wendy approaches to give him a kiss, Tinker Bell intervenes. John Caird and Trevor Nunn's introduction to the 1997 Royal National Theatre production notes that this prohibition was never Barrie's original intention and was added only for a 1927 production in which Jean Forbes-Robertson took the role and played Peter with a lighter, more fairy-like physicality. Robertson went on to play the part almost every year until 1939.

  The inability to be touched is not only a stage direction. Peter is described as being forgetful and self-centred, and as being unable to love. He must forget his own adventures and what he learns about the world in order to stay childlike. What looks like freedom is also a kind of sealed-off existence.

• 4. Neverland and Its Inhabitants

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  Neverland appears different to every child, but the island wakes up when Peter returns from London. That detail, from Barrie's Peter and Wendy, sets the scale of Peter's influence: the whole landscape responds to his presence.

  Tiger Lily, described by Barrie as "a princess in her own right", is the daughter of the chief Great Big Little Panther. Peter rescues her from Marooners' Rock after she is kidnapped by pirates. Tinker Bell is a common fairy and Peter's best friend; he calls her Tink. Her jealousy drives some of the story's darkest turns, including leading the Lost Boys to shoot arrows at Wendy and ultimately revealing Peter's hideout to Captain Hook.

  The Lost Boys themselves, which include Tootles, Nibs, Slightly, Curly, and the Twins, are boys who were lost by their parents after they fell out of their perambulators. In the novel Peter and Wendy, Peter thins them out when they start to grow up. In the 2006 official sequel Peter Pan in Scarlet, what this means is made explicit: when Slightly begins to age, Peter banishes him to Nowhereland, the home of all the Long Lost Boys Peter has exiled before him.

  Captain Hook's two principal fears are the sight of his own blood and one saltwater crocodile. The crocodile swallowed Hook's hand after Peter cut it off in a duel, and then swallowed a ticking clock, which now announces its approach. Peter is a skilled swordsman who rivals even Hook; he also has keen vision and hearing, and can mimic Hook's voice and the ticking of the crocodile. Barrie writes that in the chapter "The Mermaids' Lagoon", there is almost nothing Peter cannot do.

• 5. From Stage to Everywhere

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  Peter Pan's first appearance on screen came in 1924, in an American silent film released by Paramount Pictures. Disney's 1953 animated film established the green costume and the pointed elf-like ears that most of the world now pictures when they hear the name. Robin Williams played Peter as an adult who has forgotten he was ever Pan in the 1991 film Hook, directed by Steven Spielberg, with Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook and Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell.

  Barrie gave the copyright to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in 1929. Although the works have since entered the public domain, the hospital retains the right to collect royalties from adaptations in the United Kingdom through a special amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The reach of the character extends well beyond film. In 2002, Peter Pan appeared on a series of UK postage stamps issued by Royal Mail on the centenary of Barrie's creation of the character. Barrie had earlier commissioned a bronze statue by sculptor George Frampton, erected overnight in Kensington Gardens on the 30th of April 1912 as a surprise to the children of London. Six further casts from that original mould were installed across the world, including in Brussels in 1924, Bowring Park in St. John's, Newfoundland in 1925, and Sefton Park in Liverpool in 1928.

  The character's name has been adopted by Peter Pan Bus Lines, Peter Pan peanut butter, Peter Pan Records, and Peter Pan Seafoods. In the early 1960s, Cuban families sent children to resettle in Miami to protect them from conditions under the Castro regime; the program was called Operation Peter Pan, or Operación Pedro Pan. A Thoroughbred racehorse named Peter Pan I was born in 1904, the same year the play premiered.

• 6. The Psychology of Never Growing Up

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  American psychologist Dr. Dan Kiley popularised the Peter Pan syndrome in his 1983 book The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. He described individuals, usually male, with underdeveloped maturity. His follow-up, The Wendy Dilemma, published in 1984, advises women romantically involved with such individuals on how to improve their relationships.

  Barrie built the psychology into the original text. In the play and novel, Peter symbolises the selfishness of childhood. The narrator ponders what might have been if Peter had stayed with Wendy, so that his cry of "To die will be an awfully big adventure" might have become "To live would be an awfully big adventure", but, as Barrie writes, "he can never quite get the hang of it".

  Peter ran away from his parents when he was a baby. When he returned, the window was closed and there was a new baby in the house. He concluded that his parents no longer wanted him and never went back. The younger sibling is mentioned in the chapter "Lock-Out Time" in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and is then never referred to again, a dropped thread that mirrors how Peter himself moves on from everything.

  In Barrie's telling, Mrs. Darling had heard as a child the legend that when children died, Peter accompanied them part of the way to their destination so they would not be frightened. The boy who cannot grow up is also the one who escorts children toward death. That pairing of innocence and mortality is what makes Peter Pan something other than a straightforward children's story, and it is the detail Barrie embedded most quietly in the work.