Many of the most memorable experiences of drama for modern children have been
television adaptations of such books as John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (1935),
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight
Garden (1958), and more recently Peter Dickinson’s ‘Changes’ trilogy (1968–1970) and
Jill Paton Walsh’s Torch (1987). But Peter Pan was play first and play foremost,
exploiting the resources of theatrical lighting, visual and sound effects (most famously
the ticking crocodile) and circus-like spectacle such as flying.
Lancelyn Green notes that Peter Pan’s only significant predecessor as children’s
theatre, the play Bluebell in Fairyland by Seymour Hicks (which was first produced in
1901 and which supposedly prompted Barrie to the writing of a fairy play) had ‘only half
escaped from pantomime or operetta’ (2). Bluebell in Fairyland was a fantasy or dream
play, which in itself provided the model for numerous successors, but it relied heavily on
pantomime effects. Nor is Peter Pan itself at all free of them: the tradition of having Peter
Pan played by an actress obviously reflects the pantomime’s ‘principal boy’. But with
these two plays the leap was made from pantomime to true drama as the proper sphere
of children’s theatre, and Peter Pan is a central work not only for its mythopoeic
originality but for its pioneering creation of a genre.
The years up to the First World War produced one other masterpiece, the allegorical
fairy story The Blue Bird, by the Belgian symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck, which was
first performed in Britain in 1909. Unfortunately this subtle and moving story is difficult
to stage and has rarely been produced (though it is one of the works commemorated in
Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes). Far less distinguished but more accessible and readily
stageworthy was Where the Rainbow Ends (1911) by Clifford Evans and John Ramsey,
the story of a quest by supposedly bereaved children for their lost parents, whom they
find in a magic land. Bearing traces of Peter Pan, this play is also noticeably imbued
with the febrile patriotism which by 1911 was already creating psychological
preconditions for the war. Nevertheless, it retained its popularity for many years. Shaw’s
Androcles and the Lion (1913), allegedly written as a counterblow to Peter Pan, is a
satirical play of sporadic genius but not really a work for children at all; its
shortcomings as children’s theatre are very evident if it is compared with the witty and
entertaining Androcles and the Lion (1963) by the gifted American children’s dramatist
Aurand Harris, which is written in the style of Italian commedia dell’arte.
For children’s theatre the interwar years were chiefly distinguished by the work of
actor-managers and educators with special interests in children’s aesthetic
development. Not all of them wrote plays, and even those who did, like the gifted and
influential American writer and director Charlotte Chorpenning, are remembered less for
the competent and popular plays they wrote as for their practical theatre initiatives. In
Chorpenning’s case these stretched over many years at the Goodman Theatre of the Art
Institute of Chicago. In Britain much the same was true a few years later of Brian Way,
and their achievement belongs most closely not with the dramatists but with great
pioneers of educational drama such as Caldwell Cook (whose book The Play Way (1917),
is an important milestone) and above all of Peter Slade, whose book Child Drama (1954),
and inspiring gift for matching practice with theory, supplied a powerful influence for
the following generation. Along with several founders of sometimes short-lived but none
TYPES AND GENRES 213