And so all the power of Barrie's strangeness slips away, leaving only an immense pity for a young mother dying and leaving her sons. There is plenty of boyish romping, but no scene that lingers long enough to give room to complexity. Instead there's just a summer-soaked hymn to the imagination and a subdued, unspoken love affair, Brief Encounter with Billy Liar dream-escapades thrown in. Everything odd and intriguing about the real story is smoothed away – no inconvenient Arthur Llewelyn Davies, no thought of blaming Barrie for the failure of his marriage, no marked interest in the boys as boys, no insight into Barrie's glum and fantastical complexities. Finding Neverland tenders the same story as The Lost Boys, but this time as a sweet romantic fable. Holm has played both Barrie and Lewis Carroll more recently, and more implausibly, Johnny Depp has nearly followed in his footsteps by acting both The Mad Hatter and, in Marc Foster's Finding Neverland (2004), the author of Peter Pan. The attentiveness and patience of the piece, its combining the richness of a novel and the virtues of theatre with the resources of television (the voice-over, the use of landscape) are qualities that it would be hard to find now on British TV. The acting is note-perfect too, especially Ian Holm's performance as Barrie. The programme's brilliance arises both from Birkin's commitment to accuracy and from the knowledge that truth must be something concealed from us, somewhere playing hide and seek among the manuscripts and letters. It can be hard to forgo any myth of departed splendour, and for me, watching Andrew Birkin's The Lost Boys (1978) itself fostered nostalgia for the hallowed decades of British television drama. That we now know so much about the story behind Peter Pan is mostly down to one writer. Though complex, out-of-kilter and puzzling, such books also evoke an enchanted quietness. The tales long for a lost and heartless innocence, and are key texts in what has been perceived to be the golden age of children's literature, that series of great works running from The Water Babies to Winnie the Pooh. Yet out of his friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family emerged Barrie's various versions of the Peter Pan story. That his remoteness involved a possessing hunger for company was his – and the boys' – tragedy. What facilitated the friendships was Barrie's zest for fantasy combined with a sense of self-enclosure about the man. Was he "in love" with George and then Michael? Was he attempting to return to his own boyhood through theirs? Did he love or lust after Sylvia? No one knows. What motivated Barrie will always remain uncertain. ![]() Then George Llewelyn Davies died on the western front during the first world war and after the war, Michael killed himself, drowning in the arms of a friend at Oxford. When Sylvia herself succumbed to cancer, Barrie became the boys' guardian. Ansell left Barrie for a younger writer, Gilbert Cannan. As the sons grew older, his interest wandered from George to young Michael. ![]() When Arthur died of cancer of the jaw, Barrie helped the family financially, sending the boys to Eton. To the mother, he was at least a very good friend and confidant what the father made of him is a little more opaque. Barrie became indispensable to the boys, a playful companion and teller of tales. He soon got to know the boys' beautiful mother Sylvia, and also her unfortunate husband, Arthur. It is possible their marriage was never consummated. Barrie was not so happily married to the actress Mary Ansell they themselves had no children. Already a highly successful writer, in 1897, while walking in London's Kensington Gardens, Barrie befriended the young Llewelyn Davies boys (five-year-old George, and his younger brothers Jack and Peter later came Michael and "Nico"). There's a sense that back then people were uninhibited by knowledge of inhibition. In watching or reading about Barrie's life, one discovers improbable strangeness. There was little he did not know about the guilt of authorship. Barrie presents a portrait of the Author as such, a paper man whose life passes between the event and the notebook that records it. His quirk is the knowing zest with which he exploited his past in books. It can be no surprise that this upbringing scarred him. But David would always win, destined as he was to remain forever 12 years old, while Barrie was condemned to grow up. Young Barrie did his best to claim her distracted attention, calling her back by amusing her and consciously impersonating his dead brother. His mother took to her bed, too depressed to engage with her remaining children. ![]() When he was seven, his older brother David died in a skating accident. ![]() The story begins in James Matthew Barrie's childhood in Kirriemuir.
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