BBC's "Peter Pan Goes Wrong" Yet So SO Right
What is Comedy But Pain and Suffering With a Smile?
Peter Pan is a beloved story by J. M. Barrie.
BBC One’s Peter Pan (Greg Tannahill) is a cunt. Either way, it is that lovable, playboy air we’ve come to know and enjoy.
I didn’t realize they have a series of “… Goes Wrong” because hoo boy that is a weekend I am willing to sit down and watch all of these shorts.
BBC One’s version of the boy wonder is an interactive show, the audience expected (and also forced) to interact with notecards but the characters on the stage break the fourth wall often and it is a pleasure to see.
At one point, the audience is booing Captain Hook (Henry Shields) and he gets so emotional because why are you booing this man, he’s only playing a role, he’s doing the best with a single hand that that little fucker over there cut off, he’s so done with us and I love that. It fits so well with the show.
This show is short and sweet. It touches on all the major plot points of the original Peter Pan in under an hour but it shells the story out in a peculiar, spastic way that makes the familiar story fun again.
We get the Darling children and their immediate quirks.
We get sassy Tinker Bell (Nancy Zamit) and rapid fire failing costume changes (since the actress plays multiple characters that, for some reason, appear in the scene almost one after the other at some point. It’s quite hilarious. Funnier for the obvious effort she puts into trying to strip efficiently).
We get boisterous and arrogant Peter. Always the flirt. Always the one saying yes to the next adventure.
They do their quick spiel on Neverland and pixie dust, there’s Tiger Lily and a crocodile and the pirates on the Jolly Roger.
Long story short, there’s nothing about this Peter Pan that we haven’t seen reduced, reused, redone in a different way. What they do have going for them is the simplicity of parody. As well as the streamlined intertextual knowledge of who these characters are, what they are doing, and where they are going because c’mon.
This is Neverland. That’s Peter, the boy wonder. This is a familiar story.
What BBC gets right is they don’t try to compete with every rendition of Peter Pan there is. Instead they make it their own, spicing up scenes with The Office-esque humor and fourth wall breaks because the making of the magic on stage is just as important as the narrative they are trying to tell.
Balling on a Budget
What strikes me as visually and narratively hilarious is the fact that all the problems of the stage performance seem to stem from a failure of funds.
Like, they make it very clear that the only reason they can perform on stage for the BBC is because Michael (Dave Hearn) has a relative who runs the BBC. Their stuntmen seem a little incompetent (though that could be more the fault of the actors more than anything) and there are broken doors, crashing bunk beds, fire. Oh god is there a fire problem.
Actors wear more than one wig to portray the multitude of characters and sometimes forget who’s who.
It’s all, of course, a joke, but it’s so entertaining to see the dumpster fire that happens when a play doesn’t go off without a hitch.
When everything you’ve practiced, when everything you know the audience will inherently know, is thrown off kilter because of the way the story is presented.
The crocodile swims across on a fucked up dolly. They couldn’t afford an understudy for Peter, so when the actor gets mortally wounded, the lighting technician steps up to read lines from the story bible. The cables to make the actors fly frequently malfunction.
It’s almost as if every theater major’s worst nightmare gets realized in this play.
It’s bloody brilliant.
It’s so silly, poking fun at how serious this stage business is, how serious we take these golden stories from what modern society has dubbed the British-literary-aristocracy, how unserious we should take ourselves when we are having fun.
Which, I would argue, is the very essence of the original Pan.
Because this show is just fun. Great, rollicking fun, often at the expense of the actors, always at the expense of telling the story because like I said, retelling Peter Pan’s adventure isn’t our main narrative; it’s how it is told that makes this rendition so fun!
Cut For Humor
This was filmed in front of a live audience so obviously the stage crew had a lot of opportunity to redo scenes and get it just right and make the audience have just the right reaction (see American Idol or any other live recording of your favorite shows. My friends went to Disney’s The Little Mermaid Live with Shaggy and Auli’i Cravalho and goddamn John Stamos and it was an ALL DAY experience, redoing scenes until they were just right and the Disney directors got the shot they wanted with the energy they needed).
The beauty of the stage is the vastness of it.
We see the action that the main protagonist is completing, but often there are layers, a background and mid ground to the accepted foreground, chorus characters or side characters that smile and dance and sing their songs even when the worlds’ eyes are focused elsewhere.
So much happens on the stage that demands your attention, and if you watch a show enough times you pick up on what is happening in the background that only adds to the main story that is happening with our protagonists.
Because this was shot on the stage but filmed for video, that vastness is diminished.
But it is also enhanced.
We lose the massive amount of detail in the stage works, in the movements of every character across the scene because we have close ups, shot-reverse-shot, cutaways to the audience. We get a more streamlined story, but it is at the cost of detail and extravagance that comes with a live performance. There is often so much going on on that stage, but because the camera directs your attention to certain things, we have to follow along with the cuts, no exploration necessary.
However, it is enhanced because of the timing of the cuts. Jokes that may fall flat or visual/physical comedy are enhanced when sounds are clipped, the awkward action cuts to something else and immediately jumps back, where the actors are unawares and unprepared.
The humor comes from the speed of the cuts and how the stage actors are ill prepared for how fast everything is transgressing from the get-go.
They play along with the camera(s), with the awkwardness of Michael Scott but the confidence of a second-rate pornstar finally debuting on the stage.
This was absolutely cut for comedy and you get that sense of what to expect within the first 5 minutes of the show.
So if it’s something that you don’t vibe with, you can click away immediately. But the journey is, I would argue, well worth an hour of your time~
Self Awareness
It’s kind of great how self aware everyone is. It’s depressing at other times, but it’s great. It almost doesn’t feel like a professionally put together show, where the accidents are rehearsed and desired, where shit hits the fan and continues to hit the fan because no one can figure out how to turn off the shit dispenser.
The humor comes from the fact that these mistakes happen when they shouldn’t happen.
We see Peter Pan and we love Peter Pan. Yet his actor has to act even more churlish and immature with an ego the size of Texas, all of Peter’s traits but exaggerated to the extreme.
The gentle and not-so-gentle ribbing of Michael’s actor (the actor, not even the character. Talk about pawing at low-hanging fruit oof) is a constant story element, frequently mentioned and served with well-placed close-ups of Michael’s reactions to being the butt of every joke.
There’s a tad of infidelity because Peter starts macking on Mrs. Darling (played by the multi-talented Nancy Zamit) when his actor is already in a whirlwind relationship with Wendy Darling’s actress (Charlie Russell), whom Michael’s actor (Dave Hearn) has a massive crush on.
It…sounds convoluted, but I assure you it’s not. They explain everything very straightforwardly so any confusion henceforth is wholly my fault.
They play with that dual narrative of the actors and stagehands interacting, albeit awkwardly, with the actual characters of Peter Pan.
At no point is this story told with the assumption that they are getting away with hiding the silliness.
From start to finish, it is a story, actors and characters and all.
It’s narrated by David Suchet (him reading to us from a book bigger than the Bible) and when he eventually takes an arrow to the knee and bows out, we get the final line delivered by Lucy/Tootles (Ellie Morris), the most iconic line of Barrie’s work, the theme that resonates in every Peter Pan iteration, especially so in this one:
“To live would be an awfully big adventure.”
