Two of the greatest and most significant early works of dramatic literature for children
incorporate their authors’ awareness of this broader meaning and necessity for drama.
At the very beginning of J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) we see John and Wendy ‘playing
Mummies and Daddies’:
John (histrionically): We are doing an act; we are playing at being you and Father. (He
imitates the only father who has come under his special notice) A little less noise
there.
Wendy: Now let us pretend we have a baby.
John : (good-naturedly): I am happy to inform you, Mrs Darling, that you are now a
mother.
Barrie 1995:89
Arguably the whole of Peter Pan is concerned with the dramatic games of children at
play, and Peter himself is given over entirely to a life of acting and performance. And in
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1902) Sara Crewe, reduced to household
slavery and confined to a rat-infested garret by the odious Miss Minchin, finds
consolation for her plight in dramatic romance, and pretends that her attic is a cell in
the Bastille:
Sara: I pretend I have been here for years—and years and years—and years—
and everyone has forgotten all about me, and Miss Minchin is the jailer. And
I pretend that there’s another prisoner in the next cell,—that’s Becky [the
scullery maid], you know,—I’ve told her about it—and I knock on the wall
to make her hear, and she knocks like this,—you know. (Knocks three times
on wall; listens a moment). She’s not there; if she were she’d knock back.
Ah!
Ermengarde: Ah, it’s just like a story.
Sara: It is a story; everything is a story—you’re a story, I’m a story. Miss
Minchin’s a story. (Rats squeak).
Bedard 1984:91
A Little Princess was first produced in 1902—initially as A Little Unfairy Princess— and
published in Moses (1921).
In these seminal dramatic texts the continuum of drama is affirmed, from childhood
play and pretence and acting through to works of dramatic literature composed by
adults for children. O’Toole points to the widespread use of dramatic metaphors in
media reportage, citing ‘tragic mistake’, ‘dramatic rescue’, and ‘common farce’, which he
says ‘reflect the closeness of drama to reality in our lives’ (O’Toole 1976:19). He might
have added that theatrical metaphors figure largely in the everyday phrases used by
adults to control child behaviour: ‘Don’t act so silly’; ‘Stop dramatising’; ‘There’s no need
to make a scene’. In using such terms, we implicitly recognise the continuity of drama in
children’s lives, from playing to watching a play, from ‘acting stupidly’ to acting on the
stage. Drama for children is both something that you watch and something that you do,
and so important is it that we have ‘educational drama’ to make sure it is done well.
‘Dramatic literature’ such as Peter Pan and A Little Princess is only part of a much larger
spectrum of activity, one in which it is necessary to define our terms.
204 DRAMA