It's common for playwrights to take a fresh look at a classic, picking apart the period details to recapture the electricity of the original. But the world was not waiting for a new version of JM Barrie's Mary Rose - a largely forgotten piece of gothic fantasy driven by the author's preoccupation with ageing.
As a child on holiday on a Scottish island, Mary Rose vanishes, only to reappear 21 days later as if nothing has happened. Returning to the same remote spot as a grown woman, she disappears again - this time for 21 years. Like Barrie's Peter Pan, she can step out of time - but it is a more troubling experience.
Playwright D Jones's most significant change in this uneven production by Nicholas Bone for Edinburgh's Magnetic North is to put the story in the context of wartime trauma. Mary Rose's grownup son - a troubled Scott Hoatson - conflates his mother's loss with the violence and rape he has witnessed in the second world war. He equates his desire to flee, to shirk responsibility, with Mary Rose's ability to step outside the normal flow of life.
At its best, it is an interpretation that makes the play haunting rather than scary, but it also makes the final encounter between an old son and his younger mother feel like the start of a play, rather than the ending. Mary Rose, played with suitable girlishness in an otherwise overly inflected performance by Nalini Chetty, could be a tragic Peter Pan, forever out of time. But Mary remains as elusive as the reasons for this new version of the play.
