Peter Pan is as much a theatrical phenomenon as he is a literary one. Creator JM Barrie adapted his own stage play into the novel Peter and Wendy years after the play’s initial success, and the character has been a staple of English theatre ever since. There’s something delightfully homespun about the idea of a flying boy, crocodiles, pirates and fairies being depicted through the plodding mechanics of the stage, tangibility grounding the story in a way most film adaptations miss.
The idea of a stage play that traces the origins of Peter – his relationship with Hook, his attachment to the Lost Boys and his strange hold on the Darling children – is a solid one. Prequels get a bad rap usually because they fail to make a case for their own existence, but the Peter Pan story can be taken in any number of directions. Several authors penned the series of novels that Peter and the Starcatcher is based on, and Disney owns the rights, so a stage adaptation was inevitable. But the results are more than a cynical cash grab.
