I knew a child who one day decided to fly out of his window. This is one of the sentences that concludes the play Peter Pan, beware of sad children. An adaptation of the play written by J. M. Barrie at the beginning of the twentieth century and recently adapted by Gwendoline Destremau with the troupe of L'Eau qui Dort.
Most of the children were lulled by the fairy tales and fantastic stories that Walt Disney enjoyed animating on our screens. Peter Pan surely remains the most representative folktale of this tender period, to which we refer with melancholy, called childhood. This feeling of freedom, innocence and lightness, it is this little boy who refused to grow up who embodies it. This one that promises us an island where responsibilities do not exist, the imaginary country, with its lush shores and its cove with sirens. This island that the director of the play, Gwendoline Destremau, likes to translate as "The Land of Never".
So it was driven by astonishment and friendly solidarity (since the director is a friend) that we went to see this play. And more than once. Certainly, it is not a trivial activity to go to the theater and in all truth it is the subject of the play that challenges and pushes us to set foot at the Clavel theater for more than an hour of performance. In fact, Peter Pan comes to us looking for the deposits of a childhood too forgotten or too vague. Peter Pan lives in the collective imagination and it is not necessary to have read the book, seen the cartoon or the movie to know in which world you will be immersed. We suspect it, we apprehend it without really understanding it, we desire it without holding it in the palm of our hand, we ask to see.
Peter Pan elucidates the necessary questions, those posed by the iatus observed between childhood and adulthood. He "elucidates", that is to say that he puts in the light, he literally exposes it on the stage riddled with spotlights. It brings out of the shadows the secrets too often hidden, those present in our imagination. In fact, Peter Pan is the exhibition, through an enchanting musical acting, of a hidden world and even, for some, non-existent, whether it is the Land of Never or the children lost at the bottom of their cave. It is the brutal penetration of a modest childish dream driven by an aesthetic of unveiling.
And yet it is a dangerous vertigo that offers us this myth in which take refuge all those for whom reality is too heavy and tasteless. This piece is here to remind us that to take a step out of reality is to risk a fall into an illusory freedom. Because I knew a child who flew out of his bedroom window. And although clothed in Neverland dreams, his first name was not Peter Pan.
