The novel's narrator is a crusty bachelor who lives close to London's Kensington Gardens, where he meets a small boy and establishes an intense relationship with him. Yet he really first appeared two years earlier in Barrie's adult novel The Little White Bird. The opening of the play in December 1904 is now reckoned as the date of Peter's birth, for it marks the emergence of Peter as we know him, sword in hand and Tinker Bell at his side. What if no one clapped at all? But the audience responded with such wild applause that the actress playing Peter burst into tears. On opening night, Barrie was ill with nerves, holding his breath at the critical moment when Peter asks the audience to clap their hands if they believe in fairies. No one knew if this preposterous play would work, especially its anxious author. Frohman took an enormous commercial risk in backing a play of over fifty parts and of actors wired to soar above the stage. ("Great White Father" is what Peter is called by Tiger Lily and her companions.) Although it had roots in the British pantomime tradition, Peter Pan was a wholly original concoction blending pirate stories, desert island stories, Indian adventures and fairy tales, all wrapped around a satire of family life in Edwardian London. It was unlike anything that had ever been presented to children on the London stage before, but Frohman loved it - except for the title, which Barrie obligingly changed from The Great White Father to Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. Barrie was already a well-known novelist and playwright when he sat down to write his first and only play for children, which he completed and offered to the theater producer Charles Frohman in the spring of 1904. This piece is dedicated to him, and to his creator, the Scottish author Sir James M. On December 27, 2004, Peter Pan turned 100 years old.
I dreamed of flight, and fairy dust, and Indian drums sounding in the woods and insisted on leaving the bedroom window cracked in case Peter should appear.
Was Peter a boy (or girl) I had a crush on, or the dashing figure that I wanted to be myself? Play-acting the role of Wendy was boring, too much sewing and mothering of Lost Boys play-acting Peter was so much better, strutting and scheming and fighting pirates. But in my generation, we first encountered Peter as portrayed by the actress Mary Martin (in a televised version of the stage play Peter Pan), which created a certain gender confusion. For me, my first love was Peter Pan - that charming, exasperating rascal of a boy, killer of pirates and intimate of fairies. Charles Dickens once stated that Little Red Riding Hood was his first love, and if only he could have married her, he would have known perfect bliss.
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