“Wendy & Peter Pan” at the Barbican
Franco Milazzo in the City
★★★★☆
29 October 2025
There are two things the Royal Shakespeare Company is especially good at: commissioning spectacle that fills a stage and persuading grown adults to behave as if childhood still suits them. Wendy & Peter Pan, Ella Hickson’s rewiring of J.M. Barrie’s original myth, arrives at the Barbican with both those competencies in spades with its balletic wirework, a pirate crew who look like they train at salsa school, and a ship that sails onstage with the untroubled arrogance of a tardy celebrity. Indeed, Colin Richmond’s set is the production’s winning feature: a picture-book nursery that magically becomes a jungle, cave, and the high seas.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
The company’s Phelim McDermott-directed My Neighbour Totoro was a record-breaking smash when it came to this City temple to high art and they will no doubt be hoping to repeat its success. Hickson has loudly and proudly set out her stall and stated what she hopes to achieve, namely to make Wendy more than Barrie’s domesticated accessory. For a book written before women had the vote, that is a necessary and generally satisfying corrective. The text insists on re-centring Wendy as the protagonist who clawed her way out of maternal mythology and, for a while, the theatre hums with the idea that this is a grown-up girl refusing to be put back in her box. Furthermore, the RSC’s publicity heavily leans into that language of reclamation.
But there is an odd gap between declaration and deed. You can see the feminist intent in the poster and the programme, and you can also see where the play does not quite earn it. What the production sells as radical sometimes reads as cosmetic: clever costuming, a line or two reworked to sound woke, a Mrs Darling cameo that can be cheerfully read as proto-suffragette. These, though, are gestures rather than the structural overhaul the claim implies. There’s also an uneasy balance between an assertive Wendy and Hickson’s vision that frequently falls back on male-coded spectacle (sword fights, pyrotechnic bravado, the old pirate-king charisma). In short: it wants to be a feminist fairy tale, and sometimes is, but it also keeps lapsing into things that feel, frankly, like theatre dressed up in activism.
Which brings us to Toby Stephens. If you are going to cast a Captain Hook, casting a man whose CV includes a role as a Bond villain is mischievously sensible. Stephens brings to Hook the sort of cut-glass charm and malice he once deployed as Gustav Graves in 2002’s Die Another Day. He is deliciously watchable: brittle, urbane, and theatrically mean in a way that makes you forgive the occasional portentous line or anachronistic use of Gen Z-isms; it’s perhaps a missed trick not having the Captain mutter “six seven” and then make the related gesture with his hands. The Bond connection is less a gimmick, more a seasoning, and during Hook’s moving moments of self-reflection as he contemplates his own mortality, the thought occurs that some of his fellow crew were probably in nursery themselves when Stephens faced off against Pierce Brosnan’s 007.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
The rest of the cast do the heavy lifting admirably. Hannah Saxby’s Wendy, Daniel Krikler’s Peter, Charlotte Mills’s Tink as well as the ensemble of Lost Boys and Pirates give the show both lightness and, in moments, genuine emotional thrust: Hickson is at her best when she allows grief and longing to leak through the jokes and fight sequences. Jonathan Munby’s direction keeps the pace brisk enough that the running time rarely feels indulgent, and the fight choreography and flying are exciting and convincing. If the Pirates sometimes feel like they could have skipped straight out of Taika Waititi’s supremely charming Our Flag Means Death, that’s all good too.
My quarrel is less with the craft than with the conceit. A play that advertises itself as a reclamation of Wendy’s agency should either quietly accomplish that reclamation or be audacious enough to admit its compromises. Here, the production sits between those poles: often exhilarating, sometimes emotionally truthful, occasionally thin where it should be courageous. The set will make children gasp; the script will give adults something to think about; the marketing will hand you a feminist slogan. Whether that slogan is earned is a more complicated question – and one that will irritate, amuse, and reward different people in different measures.
Final note for theatregoers: come for the flying and the ship (both are magnificent), stay for the odd, sharp, unexpectedly mortal moment when Hickson lets Wendy, Peter, and Hook mourn what they have already lost. If you leave all smiles, that’s theatre doing its job; if you leave mildly irritated that avowed empowerment has been made into a disappointing spectacle, that’s theatre doing the other thing it does very well: starting arguments.
