I never thought I'd live to see the day when Peter Pan entered a no-fly zone. But the most extraordinary feature of this synthetically reductive musical, with score by George Stiles and lyrics by Anthony Drewe, is that Barrie's mythic hero becomes airborne only in the final seconds. That seems all too symbolic of a show that for most of the evening refuses to take wing.
Its sole redeeming feature is the stage presence of Susannah York as the story-teller. Looking something of an ageless Peter Pan herself, with her cropped hair and plum-coloured trouser suit, she guides us through Barrie's alarming masterpiece with wide-eyed curiosity. She invests the climax with genuine emotion as she confronts the dilemma of whether it is better to achieve conformist adulthood or be stuck in a state of arrested development.
However, almost all else is woeful. Richard Wilson works hard as Captain Hook but is handicapped by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's extravagantly silly, attention-seeking costumes, and by an attempt to decriminalise the character. Clad in crystal-encrusted black velvet, Regency-striped coat and a white wig you could stuff a sofa with, he looks more like Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington than Barrie's saturnine villain. He even gets to sing a number, with David Bamber's twee Smee, entitled It's a Curse to Be a Pirate with a Conscience, that finally drains Hook of what little menace he has left.
Virtually everything that makes Barrie's original play enticing is sacrificed. Instead of sailing through the air on wires, James Gillan's Peter and the Darling children feebly simulate flight by bouncing up and down behind a billowing, Brechtian white sheet. The on-stage croc with ticking clock is replaced, in Will Bowen's Rackhamesque design, by a set of reptilian molars above the proscenium arch. And the "Red Indians" are represented solely by Tiger Lily in suspendered, buffalo-skin trousers - though whether this reduction of the braves is the result of political correctness or theatrical economy is hard to tell.
Years ago we all used to complain of the slightly tatty traditionalism of the annual Peter Pan revival. But at least it had a full-blooded theatricality sadly missing from this weird hybrid, which is part play, part fashion show and part concert performance, with members of the Royal Philharmonic lined up behind the actors like sitting ducks. The director, Ian Talbot, vainly tries to bind the elements together. But the moral is that Peter Pan is a dramatic event that belongs in a theatre, not in a concert hall, where, like the hero, it remains obstinately grounded.
· Until January 12. Box office: 020-7960 4242.
