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That night, Peter Pan flies in through the window with his fairy companion Tinkerbell. He teaches the Darling children how to fly, and they take off with him for his home in the Never Land. Alerted by the faithful Nana, Mr. and Mrs. Darling rush in just in time to see their children disappear.

In the Never Land, Wendy becomes “mother” to Peter and the Lost Boys: orphans who fell out of their carriages as babies and were never claimed. She sees her sojourn in Peter’s world as a delightful interlude, until she learns that Peter (who, unlike the Lost Boys, ran away on purpose) once tried to return home and discovered that his mother had forgotten him.

Wendy’s intent to go home with her brothers at once is thwarted by a raging battle between Lily and her tribe of Amazon warriors, allies of the Lost Boys, and their mortal enemies the Pirates, led by Captain James Hook. There is a longstanding grudge between Hook and Peter, stemming from the day Peter cut off Hook’s hand and fed it to a crocodile. Having tasted him once, the crocodile has pursued Hook ever since, hungering for the rest of him.

Hook and the Pirates capture the Lost Boys and tie Wendy to the mast of their ship, but Peter triumphs in a spectacular showdown that ends when Hook jumps overboard into the crocodile’s mouth.

Wendy, John and Michael return home, where Mr. Darling has been sleeping in Nana’s doghouse out of remorse. The Darlings adopt the Lost Boys – all except Peter, who chooses freedom over family and flies away in pursuit of more adventures.

The other play is now forgotten, while Peter Pan is a part of everyone’s imaginative landscape. It certainly captivated Frohmann. He told Barrie to forget about the other play: he was going to produce Peter Pan exactly as Barrie had written it. He was as good as his word, and thus set a precedent that has given technical directors nightmares ever since.

But it is not just the spectacle of the play that is out of the ordinary. It’s easy to get so caught up in the endless procession of crocodiles, pirates and other wonders of Peter Pan that one misses the real wonder: the author’s amazing ability to show the adult in the child and the child in the adult. To capture this, Barrie created a theatrical language that allows every character, young or old, to play with the complete conviction that children bring to a game of make-believe.

But, like that child making a game up as it goes along, Barrie never really stopped re-inventing Peter Pan. By the time he wrote the novel Peter and Wendy in 1911, the play had been running for seven years and had already had at least four different endings.

This fact, and everything else we know about Barrie’s relationship to the play, made it impossible for me to ignore the possibility of bringing the storyteller on stage. In the novel, and even in his stage directions to the play, Barrie takes such delight in addressing the audience directly – how do you think it will turn out? – that I felt it could be wonderful to watch the play in the company of the man who is creating it for us.

The story of a childhood willing itself never to grow up, doomed never to be loved or able to return love, it is a profoundly wise play on the subject of choices and their consequences. It has been called “the Hamlet of children’s literature,” and while children adore it, Barrie’s play speaks just as strongly to adults in many complex ways.

In 1997, theatre critic Michael Billington, selecting his ten finest English-language plays of the century, proposed an unexpected first choice: Barrie’s Peter Pan, “a vast, poetic, sprawling, dark masterpiece about life and death and love and loss and crocodiles and fairies who will die unless children applaud them.” One hundred years after the first production, a writer for the British Theatre Guide recalled: 

    Catharsis is hardly a word one associates with Peter Pan, but as the
    audience filed out into the night wiping their eyes, passers-by could
    have been forgiven for thinking that we had just seen a production
    of King Lear or Antigone.

The play became a meal ticket, not just for Barrie himself but also for thousands of actors in the century that followed: everyone from the fourteen-year-old Noël Coward to Mary Martin, Ian McKellan, Boris Karloff, Julia Roberts and Robin Williams. It has also, of course, provided a unique and continuing source of funds for the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, which receives royalties from the many British productions of the play.

Believing in Peter Pan, taking Barrie’s play seriously, can take several paths: the biographical, the psychological and the cultural.

Barrie’s life has been strenuously chronicled, though the film Finding Neverland, made to mark the hundredth anniversary of the play’s launch, changed or disregarded many facts. Most biographies show how the “boy who couldn’t grow up” proved both a blessing and a curse to those closely associated with him.

The story of Barrie’s own traumatic childhood certainly illuminates much that is odd about Peter Pan, from the protagonist’s claim that his mother locked him out of the nursery to the obsession with cheating death. Barrie’s revered older brother met with a fatal accident at thirteen – thus becoming, like Peter Pan, forever fixed in boyhood. Barrie felt that he could never replace his dead brother in his mother’s affections, try as he might – and he did try, dressing up in the older boy’s clothes. Somehow this experience seems to have frozen his emotional growth in perpetuity.

But it’s not the whole story. Barrie’s complex relationship with the five Llewelyn Davies boys, superbly told in Andrew Birkin’s 1977 television series and book The Lost Boys, is unbearably poignant. Barrie befriended five little brothers while they were playing in Kensington Gardens and subsequently got to know their parents, a young and struggling barrister called Arthur Llewelyn Davies and his wife, Sylvia.

Despite their father’s resentment, the married but childless author showered the boys with affection, holidays and Eton educations. When father and mother died of cancer within three years of each other, “Uncle Jim” installed himself as guardian of the (by now famous) five.

The boys continued to be hit by tragedy. George, the eldest, was killed in Flanders in 1915. Michael, the brother on whom Barrie most doted (two thousand letters between them were later burnt by the family), drowned in Oxford in 1921, the evidence suggesting a suicide pact with a male friend. And a third brother, Peter, despite becoming a successful publisher, threw himself under a Tube train at Sloane Square in 1960, a month before the centenary of Barrie’s birth – an event that he knew would refuel his unwanted association with what he called “that terrible masterpiece.” In eulogizing his beloved Michael, Barrie himself heartbreakingly referred to the deceased adolescent as “the one who would never grow up.”

For a work inspired by (and ostensibly written to amuse) children, it is astonishingly full of adult psychological overtones, even if they are frequently obscured by cotton-candy sanitization (as in Disney’s 1953 animation). For instance, Peter professes to hate his own mother, yet desires to turn his chaste Wendy into one.

As for the persona of Peter himself, only the theatre tradition of casting an adult actress in the role cloaked Barrie’s audacity in creating a stage hero who was both a pubescent child and also dangerously charismatic, even sexy. Some recent productions in which Peter is played by a young male actor, as he is in this one, have garnered serious critical attention. As long as Peter was still conceived as merely a “principal boy,” as a trouser role for short-haired women, no critic would have dreamt of selecting the play as the finest of the century.

To modern eyes, in short, the whole play reads like the work of a man determined to cram into one seemingly innocent night in the theatre every fixation to be found in Sigmund Freud’s casebook. Yet in 1904, of course, Barrie could not have known Freud’s work. And that makes Peter Pan even more unsettling for tapping into something universal. Thus Peter Pan is important less for its insights into Barrie’s own psychology than for its recognition in art of truths that are only later picked up by psychologists.

George Stanley Hall’s pioneering study Adolescence, published in 1904 (the same year as Peter Pan), calls across time to the lost children of our present. More recently, in The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men who Have Never Grown Up (1983), Dr. Dan Kiley writes: 

    A careful and thoughtful reading of Barrie’s original play opened my eyes
    to a chilling reality. As much as I wanted to believe the contrary, Peter
    Pan was a very sad young man. His life was filled with contradictions,
    conflicts, and confusion. His world was hostile and unrelenting. For all
    his gaiety, he was a deeply troubled boy living in an even more troubling
    time. He was caught in the abyss between the man he didn’t want to
    become and the boy he could no longer be. . . . The legion of Lost Boys
    has members of all ages. Many “successful” adult men today still behave
    like lost children.

With such ore to mine, it’s not surprising that so many have continued to examine and re-imagine “the terrible masterpiece.” Throughout a library of films, cartoons, musicals and pantomimes, Peter Pan has become a cultural icon representing everything from pop psychology syndromes to a brand of peanut butter.

In fact, Peter Pan is arguably the last man-created myth of near-universal appeal, in the sense that subsequent fantasy narratives have tended to be regarded as pastiches of a genre to which Barrie’s belongs unambiguously. Remember that Michael Jackson called his ranch outside Santa Barbara Neverland. His biographer Michael Taraborelli repeats a conversation in the 1980s when Jackson told Jane Fonda: “All over the walls of my room are pictures of Peter Pan. I totally identify with him,” he said, wiping his eyes, “the lost boy of Never-Never-Land.” Like the King of Pop, Peter Pan is not especially the work of a man who could never grow up, but of someone who never knew the pleasure of being young – as Barrie himself must have discovered at a fearful cost to his emotional equilibrium.

In an era when, for the first time in history, adults can spend great parts of their lives inhabiting the fantasy creations of virtual reality, game playing in cyberspace has become a comfortable sanctuary for Peter’s boast that “to die would be an awfully big adventure.”

Peter Pan is one of the most resonant myths in our cultural folklore. Its longevity is evocatively explained by C. S. Lewis in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”: 

    When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been
    ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read
    them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things,
    including the fear of childish things and the desire to be very grown up.

Believing in Peter Pan means examining what it can teach children of all ages and across all ages. But it most certainly doesn’t mean that children can no longer enjoy it – just that, unlike Peter himself, Barrie’s masterpiece has finally grown up.

Bob Hetherington is Professor and Chair of Theatre and Dance at the University of Memphis. A version of this article originally appeared in Fanfares, the newsletter for Members of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.