FIVE STARS

The temptation to tamper with the storyline of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is one that theatre companies have found hard to resist. Pantomime versions appeared the very year following the stage debut of The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up in 1904 and these have been a staple of festive entertainment in the years since.

Wendy and Peter Pan, the wonderful family Christmas show at Stratford, is not a pantomime but a cleverly refocused new version of the tale. As the title suggests, writer Ella Hickson has beefed up the role of the female among the Darling children. She is as important in the story as Peter himself, emerging not as the supine mother figure we are used to but as an empowered woman who becomes a real threat to villainous Captain Hook.

So, likewise, do the buxom, all-too-physically-present and amusingly streetwise fairy Tink, who is endearingly portrayed by Oxford School of Drama graduate Charlotte Mills, and the princess Tiger Lily (Michelle Asante) who, robbed of her braves by the murderous pirate chief, is now a lone hunter out for revenge.

Meanwhile, in the ‘real’ world of Edwardian England, we find Mrs Darling (Rebecca Johnson) flirting with the Suffragettes as she struggles to slough off the duties of the female role as these are imagined by her husband (Andrew Woodall). By the end, lessons have been learned by him as well as by his offspring.

Does this strongly feminist ‘take’ make members of the audience — men especially — feel as if they are being preached to? Not a bit, because the whole thing is handled with such wit, with so much engaging characterisation and — in the staging by director Jonathan Munby — so much use of the amazing technical resources of the state-of-the-art Royal Shakespeare Theatre that one becomes lost in admiration.

Smiles are accompanied by almost as many tears in a play not afraid to confront the realities of death, beginning with that of a new member of the Darling family, Tom (Colin Ryan), who is seen playing war games with his brothers (Jolyon Coy, comically ‘grown-up’, and Brodie Ross) in a superb start to the show.

Wendy (Fiona Button) is content to be the ‘damsel in distress’ at this stage. But with Tom gone, and having learned from Peter Pan, on his nocturnal nursery visit, of the existence of the Lost Boys, she determines to travel to Neverland and extract him from their number.

Excellent performances abound in the show, especially those of Ms Button and Sam Swann, a strutting, winsome Peter, with potential, it would seem, to be a lover as well as a fighter. Guy Henry’s Hook does not on this occasion cry “Floreat Etona” after his fatal appointment with the crocodile, but his impeccable upper-class manner would certainly suggest an education in the vicinity of Slough.

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Until March 2
Box office: 0844 800 1114 or www.rsc.org