Last summer Welsh National Opera brought Schoenberg’s formidable Moses und Aron to Covent Garden. This year it offered something a little more family-friendly in the form of Peter Pan by Richard Ayres and librettist Lavinia Greenlaw.
It was a welcome sight indeed to have the stalls of the Royal Opera filled with excited children, their parents and the odd critic in seats that cost a fraction of their usual price.
With its subtext of absent parents, stunted or repressed emotional growth and Oedipal desires, the story of Peter Pan is fertile territory for Freudians. This version is more than a simple entertainment for children, though it works on that level too, offering perceptive or amusing asides for the grown-ups as well. But it’s all done with a lightness of touch worthy of the elusive airborne sprite and his fairy sidekick, Tinker Bell.
Ayres is best known in this country for his opera The Cricket Recovers, given at Aldeburgh in 2005. Like the earlier score, that for Peter Pan is eclectic, whizzing virtuosically through centuries and genres of repertoire — with Stravinsky, Broadway musicals, film scores and comic opera all part of the mix — in an engaging potpourri that manages to sound original. The ear catches something like Petrushka or The Rite of Spring but before it can be processed, we’re in another era. The WNO players under Erik Nielsen were happily on top form.
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Keith Warner’s hugely inventive production, with designs by Jason Southgate, costumes by Nicky Shaw and choreography by Michael Barry, enables the social and psychological dimensions of the story to be touched on without any risk of overload.
Edwardian railway carriages allude to J M Barrie’s England, while a visible backstage crew serve to suggest that we’re watching a provincial dramatic society enactment of the drama, with pirates and Lost Boys alike played, fittingly, by adults in short trousers.
The virtuosity of the stagecraft matches that of the score, with Iestyn Morris, spinning acrobatically in his harness, projecting a Peter who’s endearing but also selfish, even callous. Marie Arnet’s Wendy is also outstanding, with Ashley Holland doubling admirably as Mr Darling and Captain Hook, and Hilary Summers as Mrs Darling and Tiger Lily. The two hours, like Peter Pan himself, flew by.
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