17 November 2025
“I am Wendy Darling; I am brave and strong and I’m going on an adventure – who’s with me?”
If you have a daughter, niece, sister, mother or grandmother – and most of us do – then I heartily recommend gifting them tickets to the RSC’s latest production at the Barbican as I am sure they will absolutely love Wendy’s Big Adventure. But you’ll have to be quick off the mark, as the production only has another week to run.
Wendy (played with spunk by Hannah Saxby), Mrs Darling (Loita Chakrabarti), Tinkerbell (Charlotte Mills) and Tiger Lily (Ami Tredrea) are front and centre in the thick of the action with Peter Pan (a veritable man child with biceps that could crack walnuts in the shape of Dan Krikler), the Darling Boys and the Lost Boys taking very much supporting roles.
As she faces up to the death of her youngest brother Tom (another new invention deviating from the source novel) from an unspecified respitory disease, Wendy does indeed go on a huge journey and adventure towards womanhood. Doc Giles (Harrison Claxton) who fails to save Tom’s life later transmogrifies into the Crocodile, a very human-like predator stalking Captain Hook, dressed in smart suit and top hat, with a pocket watch tick tick ticking on a chain from his mouth. In a bravura feat of physicality, he slides energetically along the ground, limbs sticking up at angles, just like a menacing crocodile.
Ella Hickson’s feminist adaptation of the Edwardian classic children’s book, first produced by the RSC in 2013 and updated here, gets most things right. It looks glorious, packed with wonderful period detail; for once the Barbican’s iron curtain is raised as you enter the auditorium and you can take in the full splendor of Colin Richmond’s vaulted children’s nursery set packed with Edwardian toys and models (including a pirate ship), iron beds and a giant bay window (and we all know who careers through there one stormy night). A giant tree complete with tangled roots later descends to reveal the home of the Lost Boys.
As an age obsessed Captain Hook, Toby Stephens, channels panto baddie with a healthy dose of public school swagger. There was one hysterical moment at the end of the show when he emerged once again as Mr Darling, with his hated moustache peeling slowly off his face as the spirit gum failed under the heat of the stage lights. Turning his back on the audience in an effort to hide the offending hairpiece, he then had to deliver the line “don’t worry, children this will be gone tomorrow!”. It was probably the funniest moment of the production!
Tinkerbell, or rather Tink, is portrayed first as a trick light flung from the hands of actors across the stage like a game of catch the fairy, then she bursts out of a wardrobe as a boisterous bundle of energy sporting bovver boots, a tutu and estuary vocal charms of Karthy Burke in Gimme Gimme Gimme.
There is impressive flying and a very large Jolly Roger pirate ship glides across the stage eliciting “oohs” and “ahhs” from the youngsters in the audience.
Having Kwaku Mills’ Michael Darling eschew violence in favour of mermaids and taffeta will I’m sure strike a chord with younger members of the audience who might be questioning their own identity, I winced however, at the camp, predatory inneuendo towards Hook from Scott Karim’s Smee, who wants to be picking out Laura Ashley Print curtains for a cottage to share with his beloved captain, who in turn meets out regular face slaps. But to be fair that smut and domestic violence appeared to go over the tiniest of heads.
A tad overlong, Wendy & Peter Pan is still the perfect pre Christmas treat for all ages.
