Ahoy, me hearties! Pirates are all aboard the good ship Auckland Theatre Company’s end-of-year production of Peter Pan. But co-director Ben Crowder is keeping his gang of cutlass-clashing swashbucklers on a tight leash.
“We are not doing traditional pirates,” he says. “They have swords, but there are no patches, no pirate voice, no ‘arrs’. I’ve banned it. Actors are dying to say it and I even had a go the other day. I had to catch myself and go, ‘NO.’”
“Arrs” are fun, but this Peter Pan casts a wider net. “There is sacrifice and loss, flying, Captain Hook, a crocodile, a film, a big dog. There is Jen Ludlam as Hook and Anika Moa as the Mermaid Queen. What else do you need?”
Crowder is taking a break from rehearsals to talk about the play, a revitalised version of JM Barrie’s classic about a mercurial boy who flies between time and place and refuses to grow up.
The production has been created for the ATC by Nightsong, the wonderfully innovative theatre group Crowder runs with actor-writer-director Carl Bland. Bland, who has written the script, is also co-directing Peter Pan in the partnership they have shared for many years across many productions, including I Want to be Happy, Mr Red Light and Te Pō.
So many versions of Peter Pan have been made for stage and screen since Barrie’s original story was published in 1902, with the first play presented two years later. Its focus has shaped and shifted but its core elements remain true.
“Carl has written a very beautiful story,” says Crowder, perched on a throne from the set in the ATC rehearsal rooms, with the immense torso of a black crocodile ‒ Hook’s nemesis ‒ lying just a couple of metres away. “I’m a clown, I am adding all sorts of things but at its heart, he has written a lyrical, poetic, profound story. He has found a lot of openings and there are some fabulous themes.
“I haven’t done an analysis on which is Barrie and which is Bland, but in Carl’s story, Peter starts to discover that everything is going to change, and he has to sacrifice being young. It is not a pantomime in any way,” he adds.
“I saw a version of Peter Pan in London when I was a child, and I found it very confusing. The only film I have watched of it was the 1924 black and white silent one, which I really enjoyed. I read Carl’s script and the book and felt I didn’t need to watch any more. We are doing our own thing.”
Peter Pan portrays two parallel worlds, moving between the Darling family, who live in a contemporary New Zealand city, and Neverland, a frozen-ice fantasy-scape, which is home to the Lost Boys, Peter’s friends. Peter flits between both and sometimes the two worlds bleed into each other.
Peter loves flying in to eavesdrop on families because it reminds him of something indefinable from his past. In the case of the Darlings, they are a family dealing with a grievous loss, which they are trying to mask for the sake of their children, Wendy, John and Michael.
Before the play gets under way, a prologue will set the scene. “We are exploring if there might be a little overture from the Mermaids [Anika Moa’s band] as people are settling in,” says Crowder. “There’s an ice lagoon, which will be the orchestra pit. We have a film, which is young Peter painting a picture of a wonky house being told by his father that when he grows up, he can’t paint wonky houses. And Peter says, ‘Why not?’
“And then we start with the Darling household, and one large dog called Nana sleeping. Peter comes to listen to Mrs Darling tell the children stories and he loses his shadow. He escapes because the dog comes in.”
Ooh, yes, the dog, the one member of the cast whose behaviour Crowder and Bland will have to relegate to someone else.
“We are using a big dog the size of a small pony, a Bernese mountain dog called Roux,” says Crowder. “I am working with this great woman from Ministry of Hound in Auckland who lives with this dog. I won’t say she ‘owns’ him. In the book, the dog was rather jokingly called Nana. In this world, Nana is a family pet and that’s why we wanted a real dog to make it look like a real home.
“I think kids and adults are going to be thrilled. I love seeing a big dog on stage. I have seen two shows in my life with horses and I was totally happy. We are making a show that we would love to watch.”
Crowder is proud of Peter Pan’s diverse cast, with its range of ages as well as ethnicities. “There are 23 people who have never been on the ATC main stage before. I feel, with the young actors, that we have been bold with our casting. Nightsong did a little workshop with the ATC for students from Toi Whakaari about a year ago, and two of the cast are from there – Theo Shakes and Nova Moala-Knox, who play Peter and Wendy.
“I don’t think Theo auditioned; we got him to read. He told a story about when he was at college. They did Peter Pan and he was told he wasn’t able to play the hero or be in the Darling family because he was of Caribbean descent. We weren’t looking at who’s got a certain kind of skin colour – we were looking for someone who had the qualities. He’s got an energy you believe in.”
Crowder says they picked Moala-Knox for Wendy, the oldest girl in the Darling family, because “she was funny”.
“Wendy was the part we auditioned the most, but, shall we say that Nova did an ‘anti-audition’,” he laughs. “She was slumped. When I asked her how she felt about flying, she said, ‘Well, maybe.’ She didn’t have an agent, but I tracked her down through Dave Fane and his wife Bronwyn [Bradley], who teaches at Toi Whakaari, and I am not regretting it at all. She feels real. That young female hero thing can be very saccharine, but she is very funny.”
They have swords, but there are no patches, no pirate voice, no ‘arrs’. I’ve banned it.
Anika Moa, as the Mermaid Queen, is genius casting. “She has a part in the story but she is also part of the band, the Mermaids, with two other female musicians,” says Crowder. “They are in the set for the whole show. She has just joined the process because we have needed to shape so much with the children’s stories, and the Mermaid is a layer that comes in with the music.
“At the moment, we have her sitting with her tail in the orchestra pit so she can flip it up. She’s got a few moments in the show and I’m sure she’s going to find a few more.”
During our conversation, Crowder says a couple of times, “I don’t want to speak for Carl”, but obviously, the script has sprinkled the magic right from the start.
In a brief chat on the phone, Bland says: “I went back to the original; a lot of it is really dated, so I kept the initial narrative in my head and went off on my own merry journey. I kept what interests me. The time thing, which is recurrent in the play, that’s what I latched on to because that’s something I explore in all of my work, the nature of time itself.
“I also read a little bit about what inspired Barrie to write the story. He had a 13-year-old brother who died in an ice-skating accident. From the point of view of the whole family, that boy never aged.
“Without letting out any of the plot, it starts from that basis. There’s a dark shadow over the Darling family so you understand why the idea of flying off to Neverland and meeting Peter Pan becomes attractive. They want to fly out of the house because it’s become quite oppressive.”
However, he doesn’t want to give the impression that Peter Pan is “too heavy”.
“From a child’s point of view, it’s a great adventure story. From an adult’s point of view, it’s exploring all these deeper themes of identity and time and the nature of love.”
Bland views Neverland as a “halfway world”.
“Everything is frozen, not just the landscape but the state of mind. All the children there are losing their memories or have lost their memories of their past lives, but they remember parts of it.”
The fact that the ATC season has already been extended reveals a hunger for entertainment which might offer an end-of-year shot of good cheer.
“It’s got a great ending, a happy ending, which I think is important,” says Bland. “It shows there’s a huge need for it, something that’s uplifting and transformative. And the visuals are amazing. Flying, the big dog, the crocodile, which is genuinely scary.”
But no arrs? “Oh no, we hate that!” he says, laughing.
Peter Pan: ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland, October 8-November 3.