Howden Park Centre, Livingston, 24 April 2009, and touring

After Mary Rose

THERE’S a poignant moment towards the end of Peter Pan when a grown-up Wendy realises she can never recapture the present-tense wonder of childhood. If Peter had the emotional depth to think about it, he too would mourn the way the real world gets old while he stays eternally young. It was a theme that obsessed playwright J M Barrie, both privately and professionally and, 16 years after Peter Pan, he was still exploring it in Mary Rose.

The central character in this 1920 chiller – much admired, although never filmed, by Alfred Hitchcock – mysteriously disappears on a remote Scottish island when still a child. Her father keeps vigil and, to his amazement, discovers her 21 days later acting as if nothing has happened. When, as an adult, Mary Rose returns to the island, the same thing happens again – except this time her absence is for much longer.

On its occasional stagings, Mary Rose can provoke the audience into ghost-story screams. By contrast, After Mary Rose – a reworking of Barrie’s play by D Jones for Magnetic North – is less scary than haunting. Developing the character of Harry, Mary Rose’s son, Jones considers what would have happened if, years after his mother’s disappearance, the young man had enlisted in the army and returned from World War II suffering from post-traumatic stress.

His own evasiveness and tendency to flee from responsibility have something in common with the way his mother has evaded life altogether. When she returns to a world that has grown 21 years older, she is the frivolous twentysomething, while her son, in a cruel reversal of the norm, has the weight of the world on his shoulders.

That would have made an excellent premise for a play – a kind of tragic alternative to all those Hollywood comedies in which parents and teenagers swap roles. The problem here is that the meeting comes at the end of the play, not the beginning, which means we never get to see the true torment of someone being forced to live out of time.

Jones, who sticks so faithfully to Barrie’s original, is not prepared to follow her own dramatic logic. No sooner has the play gathered some momentum than it finishes in a way that is vague and uncertain.

It’s a shame because Nicholas Bone’s production has an atmospheric hold, with a suitably haunting piano-based score by Dee Isaacs and strong performances by Grant O’Rourke as Mary Rose’s husband and Stanley Pattison as a ghillie-turned-psychiatrist.

After Mary Rose is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness on 19 May 2009

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Links

• Magnetic North
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog