The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . J.M. Barrie’s enduring idea of the ‘little boy who never grew up’ is an appealing fantasy of eternal innocence. But the truth is darker than that. James Barrie’s older brother David perished in an ice-skating accident when J.M. was only six years old. He grew up trying to keep his brother’s memory alive, going so far as dressing in his clothes and impersonating him, to try and comfort their grieving mother. His traumatised efforts to change the past trickled into his writings, which are full of characters miraculously getting a chance to have their time again. The ‘Lost Boys’ of Peter Pan are all cot-death victims who are magically restored to life. In his greatest play, The Admirable Crichton , a butler becomes the leader of his employers when they are cast away on a desert island. And in Dear Brutus a group of middle-class English country-house guests wander into an enchanted forest that shows them how the

Bare – as its title suggests – is an emotionally revealing experience. Stripped bare of irony, self-mockery or even sub-plots, its strength rests in its honesty. It’s a coming-of-age rock musical about being gay in a Catholic boarding school in the USA, and it sets the central characters, Jason and Peter, against a backdrop of intolerant institutions – Church, school, family – with a clarion call to be yourself and not hide behind masks of conformity. That all sounds a bit Route One for an Oxford audience, and maybe it is. Bare feels like an uncomplicated, American-style, issue-led sequence of torch-songs aimed at inspiring teenagers to be true to their own identities. Jaqueline Wilson meets High School Musical . For this particular old cynic, that runs the risk of being just too saccharine. And for the first half it was. But then, as the second half took hold, it finally started to chip away at the tongue in my cheek, and by the end it had worn through my battered, emotionless defen