J.M Barrie: Are his plays still relevant to our times?

Here is a Guest Blog by Paul F. Newman, an excellent reviewer, who has kindly agreed to appear on my pages!

Thank you Paul for these interesting summaries.

J.M. Barrie

His reviews are on three of J.M. Barrie's plays.

From The Admirable Crichton to Peter Pan.

J.M. Barrie was fond of creating stories that featured fantasy islands and below are reviews of his two most well known, with another early drama sandwiched in between. Although he started as a novelist he soon turned his hand to plays yet could never resist adding copious acting or directing notes that read more like miniature novels in themselves. I read these plays again recently and enjoyed the journey into the past . . .

THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON by J.M. Barrie. (Originally performed 1902)

Crichton is the unflappably correct and loyal butler in the Mayfair household of Lord Loam. The only thing that distresses him is his master’s leanings towards a more equal society, where on certain days the servants are encouraged to eat and mix with the uncomfortable resident family and their guests. Crichton abides by the theory that society is safer when everyone knows their place and that people naturally fall into a hierarchical order if left to their own devices.

      When the accident of birth is removed, the idea of finding and accepting one’s place is allied in a sense to the survival of the fittest, and all this starts to take on a new meaning when Lord Loam and his pampered daughters and a maid, together with a couple of other upper class young men – plus Crichton (who is himself only about thirty) – get shipwrecked on a Pacific island during the course of a travelling holiday. Although at first everyone keeps to their place, other strengths and weaknesses of individual character soon emerge with an almost total reversal of roles.

      This is a comedy, a theatre play geared for laughs, and Barrie’s stage directions are incredibly lengthy, reading more like parts of a witty novel than a brief to the actors. It was an early success for him a couple of years before his all-famous Peter Pan and at first I thought it not dissimilar to the Victorian comedies of Oscar Wilde. However its concept of turning society on its head gives it a more modern relevance and it comes across as less old-fashioned than the Wilde plays. While Peter Pan remains eternal, The Admirable Crichton had a good fifty-year run of popularity, last made into a major film in 1957.

WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS by J.M. Barrie. (Originally performed 1908)

What Every Woman Knows is not at first the most self-explanatory of titles although strong female characters certainly drive the play. Historically Barrie wrote it in the first years of the twentieth century probably unaware that during the next ten years when Women’s Suffrage and Votes for Women were high on the public agenda, its title might be construed as a play that dealt directly with such current issues, and it possibly drew many people into the theatres for that reason. Not that they would have been totally disappointed. As a play of social manners it’s a good one, humorous and realistic, seeing things largely from a woman’s point of view and acknowledging that women were often the unseen force behind many a husband’s career. This is confirmed in the last paragraphs as the meaning of the title:

MAGGIE “Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the woman smiles, and let’s it go at that. It’s our only joke. Every woman knows that.”

      If you weren’t married by your mid-twenties in those days you were practically on the shelf, and the plot involves Maggie, a plain woman in her twenties, and the efforts by her loving bachelor brothers and widowed father to procure her a suitor. They make a deal with an ambitious younger man to give him the £300 he needs to establish himself in business on condition that he marry Maggie in five years time. Maggie, however, has the option of not accepting him in five years if she prefers. The young John Shand jumps at the offer even though he is not particularly enamoured of Maggie. He professes in the politest of terms that he’s not really interested in women, career always comes first, but he sees that a wife could be a social asset to him when he rises in the world and in that respect Maggie would be as good as any. Maggie, annoyed at first at her treatment as chattel, comes to warm to both the idea and the young man as he goes from strength to strength in the outer world, ending up being voted as the local Member of Parliament. Now the designated time on the bargain is up. By this time however other more worldly and sophisticated women have entered John Shand’s social sphere...

      There’s a lot of understanding of character behind what is basically a comedy. It’s hardly women’s liberation stuff though: “Man’s the oak, woman’s the ivy” – that’s our heroine Maggie speaking. It reflects a time when many marriages were those of convenience and passion was found elsewhere, yet it remains an intriguing piece of old-fashioned entertainment.

PETER PAN by J.M. Barrie. (Originally performed 1904)

The full title of the original play was Peter Pan or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (as if he had some choice in the matter) and the author never stopped fiddling around with it, the whole play I mean not just the title. Sometimes he would insert an extra character or scene deliberately for one night only in a theatre run, at other times he added lines, deleted paragraphs, upgraded Tiger Lily, downgraded Wendy and vice versa, had mothers turning up to claim the Lost Boys if they could pass certain tests, had Captain Hook trail Peter to London disguised as a schoolmaster, had soliloquies spoken by mermaids, and god knows what else... Peter Hollingdale’s 1995 Notes on the Text in the front of my OUP edition opens with the assertion that “The history of Barrie’s texts... is long and complicated”. And that is perhaps an understatement. The version appended in this book is probably the most familiar and dates in collected written form from 1928, although it is essentially what was first performed in 1904.

      To this day almost everyone is familiar with the story and characters of Peter Pan and what struck me as I read again the first scene in the nursery at the Darlings’ house was how loving it was towards children. Was the choice of the name “darling” for this family, deliberate? The impressions we usually nurture of Victorian parents being stiff and aloof from their offspring and that children should be seen and not heard is a million miles from the atmosphere of warmth and security here, where the mother and father – especially the mother – is hands-on in her dealings, reading goodnight stories and settling the high-spirited youngsters down for the night. This is a prosperous middle class family home in London, yet not run by servants. We’re candidly told amongst Barrie’s copious notes and directions that they can’t afford them, and so the children’s special nurse who helps with bath times and bedtime duties is a Newfoundland dog called Nana. With three children, Wendy, Michael and John, sharing a bedroom, Nana on guard and cosy night-lights above their beds, many a child watching the play might have envied this almost perfect family arrangement.

      And it has to be said, the story grips you. Mary Darling is a little reticent at leaving the children so as to go out with her husband that evening because she thinks she has previously seen a boy’s face at the nursery window, despite their being several floors up. A boy accompanied by a strange moving light who, we know, will return to look for his shadow that he lost when he entered the room before. He was initially drawn there, not so much to befriend the children but to hear Mrs Darling’s bedtime stories, for he, like the other Lost Boys, is a child without a mother. Tinker Bell, the moving light, takes her name from her skill at mending fairy pots and kettles (she’s a little tinker). She’s a little bitch actually, especially to Wendy, though her character is redeemed by her devotion to Peter Pan for whom she gives up her life at one point by deliberately drinking the poison that Hook has left for him. On stage her dying light is restored by the applause of the audience. “If you believe [in fairies] clap your hands.”

      There’s no specific mention of this being Wendy’s last night in the nursery, at least not in this version, in other words that she is on the brink of adolescence. She is the eldest of the children and while her two brothers are still asleep she flirts with Peter Pan in a childish way, goading him to give her a kiss – a concept he doesn’t understand. Tinker Bell understands well enough and is aroused to one of the first of her jealous fits. Wendy feels maternal when she learns that Peter has no mother and tries to embrace him but he instinctively draws away, saying “No one must ever touch me”. Peter is confused too when Wendy asks him about fairies and says she would like one herself. He states that Tinker Bell is his fairy then thinks that perhaps she can’t be because “I am a gentleman and you [meaning Tinker Bell] are a lady”. All manner of sexual and gender issues run beneath this first bedroom scene. With its tradition of the same actor playing Wendy’s father and Captain Hook, with its assertion that the Lost Boys are the babies that disappear from prams when the nurse maids are not looking, with the escape to a perpetual childhood of Never Land, the whole play has always been ripe for psychological analysis. But only if you want to take it that way. Otherwise it’s a tale that hasn’t ceased to entertain children and adults since it was first staged.

      Barrie describes Never Land (not Never Never Land in the main play, though he sometimes calls it that elsewhere), the setting for the next four Acts, thus: “You have often half seen it before, or even three-quarters, after the night-lights were lit...” Captain Hook is a formidable creation – “Naught’s left upon your bones when you have shaken hands with Hook!” – a blood-thirsty pirate captain who prides himself on dandiness and gentlemanly politeness. He speaks and dresses in the style of Charles II. Tiger Lily, now virtually forgotten in modern American renderings because of the un-p.c. of mentioning Native Americans at all, has a larger part than I remembered. More than just the Indian Chief’s daughter in need of rescue, she acts as a tribe leader and fighter in her own right.

      The Lost Boys, who feature largely, have individual names and personalities and possibly meant more to the author than to most of the children in the watching audience who I imagine would have identified more with the Darling siblings, or Peter, or even – today – the sanitised princess version of Tinker Bell. A lengthy many-paged Dedication by Barrie at the front of the play, probably written in the 1920s, is headed “To the Five” and details his adventures and inspirations with and from the five real life boys to whom he became a guardian.

      The issue of “the boy who would not grow up” is much apparent in the text, more so than in many modern productions. “What are your exact feelings for me, Peter?” asks Wendy at one point. It’s a puzzling question for Peter Pan, the heroic leader in a boy’s world of adventure who often feels the lack of a mother but is nevertheless surrounded by females (Tinker Bell, the mermaids, Tiger Lily...). He tells Wendy that Tiger Lily is always asking the same kind of things as her, “there is something or other she wants to be to me, but she says it is not my mother.”

      The version of the play we have here ends with an Afterthought. A short last act called When Wendy Grew Up. The main story concludes with everyone returning safely to the London home, to the joy of the parents who also adopt the lost boys into the family. Peter doesn’t stay, much to Wendy’s chagrin, but promises to fly back to see her once a year. He does this once, then forgets, as time has little meaning for him. Wendy, sad at first, is to some extent relieved as she is growing and maturing rapidly while Peter remains forever a boy. Then some years later he does return. Wendy is now a mother with a small daughter of her own. Little Jane is charmed by Peter and with Wendy’s approval flies away with him “just for a week”. It’s an unnecessary scene really but typical of the way Barrie was forever adding or subtracting bits to the story.

      One of the best filmed interpretations of the story must surely be Walt Disney’s 1953 full-length cartoon that follows the original plot incredibly well. Even the dress of the characters must have been based on early illustrations. The front cover picture on this present book shows Peter Pan fighting Hook (from a 1907 Peter Pan Picture Book) with Hook in 17th century garb and flowing locks and Peter with a feathered cap and a red, rather than green, tunic. Disney would better refine their features into caricatures and make Peter more elfin looking.

In Love with a dream: Thomas Hardy and his wife Emma

Beeny Cliff, Cornwall

O, the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,

And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free

The woman whom I loved so and who loyally loved me.

Beeny Cliff

Thomas Hardy is one of our greatest British novelists.  He has a style and voice that is unique and distinctive and thus hard for academics to analyze and classify.  I like that.  Dry, dusty minds do so love to pigeon hole, compare, criticise and reduce all to components and parts.  It takes the delight of reading away.  Hardy wrote from his heart and soul, a man of great feeling yet who refused to run away from life’s realities.  That is what makes his work so individual and special.  His intense and abiding love for Nature, reflected in his poetry, and the often exquisite descriptions in his prose are not of the Wordsworthian mystical variety.  Rather he saw Nature red in tooth and claw as well as in her shimmering illusory beauty.  Mother Nature, the great and mysterious Feminine, Maya, was his real love, the true love of his life.  And this ultimate love became peculiarly wrapped up in the strange relationship he had with his wife, Emma.

Hardy's birthplace

Hardy considered himself as poet first and foremost.  Born in the little hamlet of Upper Bockhampton in Dorset in 1840, he was the son of a stonemason and a fiddler.  His education finished at the age of sixteen when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architecht.  He showed promise in this work, winning prizes which ultimately took him to work in London, a place for which he had no great affinity. Country born and bred, he set his novels in rural scenes and small towns, creating his own landscapes which derived from an inner landscape of his own, a place set in earlier years when his father would have been a young lad.  The world of his father had already begun to change rapidly as the Victorian society, in all its glory and onward march into  industrialisation, modernisation, and expansion, ploughed over society as men once ploughed over the heavy fields.  He felt the heart and soul was being ripped from the land and from the men who worked it.  Despite the grinding poverty he saw around him, he realised that comradeship and the simple joys of country life were fast disappearing as more and more workers migrated to the factories and cities.

Sturminster Newton

Hardy could be said to be a nostalgic writer.  I think many writers are.  Even Dickens set his characters in an earlier period of his life and the two men had in common a sense of the injustices of society, Dickens with urban life and Hardy with rural life.  Dorset was one of the most backward of all the English counties but was a place of unparelled beauty, still fairly untouched or changed, still lovely.  The rolling countryside of Hardy’s youth became the setting for his novels. He called this imaginary place Wessex, after the old Anglo Saxon kingdom which had once covered the area of southwest England.  Hardy drew up maps and gave different names to real places in those counties and to this day the area is called ‘Hardy’s Wessex’.  

It was while Hardy was in St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 , busy with restoring the old church there, that he met Emma Lavinia Gifford.  It was with her in mind that he wrote A Pair of Blue Eyes.  She was said to be a real beauty then with her vivid blue eyes, long auburn ringlets and rosy cheeks.  Her nature was girlish, cheerful, lively, unrestrained and delightful.  Quite a contrast to the small, slender, uncertain, highly sensitive Thomas with his romantic tendency to depressions and gloom over life. Hardy felt Emma’s vibrant magic and expressed it in this extract from a poem written when he returned to London.

Emma Gifford

When I came back from Lyonesse

With magic in my eyes

None managed to surmise

What meant my godlike gloriousness

When I came back from Lyonesse

With magic in my eyes.

During the four year period of their courtship Hardy seldom visited Emma in Cornwall but she never appeared to complain or look elsewhere.  The pair eventually married in1874.  Almost at once, Hardy felt trapped by marriage as if romance could no longer exist and all the excitement of courtship was over.  Despite many happy years in their early days, he was to say in 1895 that ‘a bad marriage is one of the direst things on earth and one of the cruellest.’  Emma over time changed from the carefree, slightly wild young woman of her youth, the girl, who with her hair streaming in the wind,  rode her horse across the cliff tops to the disapproval of local folk.  She became plump and ordinary-looking, even dowdy, as if no longer taking trouble and could no longer match some of the beauties Hardy encountered while in London enjoying his fame and fortune.   

Hardy at the time of meeting Emma

Opposite natures often match well, like magnets poles, drawing one another together, but there have to be some things in common.  Unfortunately, these two were alike in ways that clashed because they rivalled one another.  That which first drew them together - a love of books, poetry, beauty of nature and a longing to express their feelings in some creative way - ultimately pushed them apart.  If Emma had borne children, it may have helped to channel some of her creative longings into life’s pleasant mundanities.  But this did not come about and she remained emotionally unfulfilled in every way.  This led to her wish to express herself through her own writing and poetry and she did publish some poetry but often at her own expense and without any encouragement. Her poetry was strange and had a mystical bent to it.  Later on in life she said, ‘I have it all here but I have not the power of expressing it’.  With encouragement she may have learnt to express it but Hardy considered her pretensions as a writer as a ‘painful delusion’.   My impression is she had a more universal view of life than Hardy who rested mainly in the human world and whose ardent love of Nature was poetic but at the same time open eyed with a realistic view.  His early faith was, like many others of the time, dissolved by Darwin’s theories.  He found it hard to reconcile the traditional Christian God with the suffering and pain he saw around him and he believed more and more in a malign and uncompromising Fate against which human beings struggled to exist and function. If he had a God it was the stern and uncompromising Jehovah and he was Job.   Emma, however, saw stranger visions that fled beyond the earthy existence.  But they were just as valid: here is one of her published poems.

In misery swirled

Is this one-moon whirled,

But there’s no sorrow or darkness there

In that mighty Planet where

There is no night.

Ten moons ever revolving

All matters its long years resolving

To sweetness and light.

Ten Moons

Emma claimed that she helped her husband considerably with ideas and suggestions when writing his first novels.  Yet there was never any mention of her or acknowledgment in any of his books.  He seemed to take her totally for granted. 

Emma in later life

Why did she change, why did marriage fail her as much as it did Thomas?  He often declared his existence to be a prison . . . why, when he was free to go where he would, often fleeing to his London apartment?  The sense of imprisonment was of his own making. He admired and flirted with several beauties when in London, extolling their writing, dancing with them and enjoying their company.  Meanwhile back home, neglected, ignored, Emma was always there, like a good mother figure while he played the errant son who was always away or else locked in his study with his writings, his despair and depressions.  He was the typical ‘puer aeternus,’ a figure studied and written about by the psychologist, Carl Jung.  The idealistic, creative man who never quite grows up inside no matter how old he may be in years.  He remains a Peter Pan who wants his Wendy there forever caring for him.  Such a man is always attached to The Great Mother or Mother Nature, the eternal Feminine principle.  Marriage is indeed a prison for such a man because it means responsibility, sharing, compromise, loss of total individuality through forming one from two - which is what marriage should be about.  Such a man never ‘feels’ married but always wants to feel life still has creative and sexual possibilities.  

From descriptions of Emma’s character, we get the impression that she was herself a ‘puella’ the female equivalent of Peter Pan.  I suspect she was no more entranced by marriage than her husband but would never have admitted it.  She felt equally trapped though in a different way.  There was a conventional streak to her that made her react with outrage when he wrote in Jude the Obscure that ‘Fewer women like marriage than you suppose . . . they enter into it for . . . the social advantages it gains them.’  The fact was that Emma came from a far higher social background than Hardy and had gone against her beloved father’s wishes in marrying him.  She had in fact ‘lowered’ herself by the standards of the time.  Plus, it was belittling to her to publicly rant about marriage and constantly praise and adore other women as Hardy did.  Scarcely surprising that she tried hard to have Jude the Obscure banned.  In fact, so adverse was reaction to this book that Hardy decided to give up writing novels and concentrate on poetry instead.  It is now considered one of his greatest works.

Hardy was not an easy man to be married to; he was very private with a distaste for prolonged intimacy of any kind, even in marriage. Was he simply a romantic dreamer for whom Woman would forever be an ideal rather than a creature of flesh and blood?   He was a complex man; a realist on one hand and an idealist on the other and very self-centred and hyper-sensitive. Emma was not the right woman to deal with this complexity for she had a longing to be someone in her own right which in that day and age was never to be fulfilled.  She eventually withdrew entirely into her own space literally and symbolically, a room in the attic where she became prey to varied ailments and complaints such as fatigue, shingles, pains, rheumatism and indigestion, all signs of depression, nervous and emotional stress.  On 25^th November 1912 she took to her bed and a couple of morning later, Hardy was asked to come up to her which he did with ill grace, weary of such summons.  Within five minutes she was dead.

After her sudden death, reading her diaries and charmingly written memories of their early happiness, Hardy now found himself strangely lonely.  She had always been there in the background of his life, the equivalent of Gabriel Oakes while he played the flighty Bathsheba.  She was the mother figure who sustained him without his even realising the fact.  But, ah!...now he no longer had the real woman, his heart and soul could dwell forever on the dream, the romance, on his ideal view of the Feminine and Nature…the girl with streaming auburn hair on her horse against the blue of the Cornish sea.  The real person could never live up to that glorious lost romantic vision.  Thus when Emma Gifford Hardy died, she came to life again in all her youthful charm and beauty and his old love welled up in him.  He then wrote wonderful love poems about Emma from her death until the end of his days, even though he remarried later.  On his own death in 1928 his heart was put near her grave at Stinsford Churchyard while his ashes were taken to Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Marsland, Cornwall

In many ways, we can draw parallells with the feelings Dante Gabriel Rossetti had for Lizzie Siddal.  They loved one another madly but as time went on, Rossetti began to ignore the woman who was once his great love and inspiration, though he did at least encourage her artistic endeavours.  After Lizzie’s untimely death, he, like Hardy, felt immense remorse and drew several strange paintings in which she became his muse again, his beloved anima,  Beata Beatrice.  He had always identified with his hero, Dante Alighieri, who loved and wrote about Beatrice, a beautiful girl who had died young and left him forever longing for the unnattainable vision.  Women loved more in death than in life.  In the same way, Hardy painted Emma in poetic pictures of love and longing.  He took a pilgrimage to Cornwall and revisited all the places that they had explored when in love and wrote with poignant sadness over a lost time when life was sharp and vivid, coloured by intense feelings, every minute detail remembered, a time never to return.  His poems are amongst his best work and speak so eloquently of that aching longing for love in every one of us, that something indefinable which no human being can ever really fulfil.

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,

The woman now is – elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore,

And knows not nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there never more.