Chickenshed, London
With a huge cast, a somersaulting Peter and pirates crawling menacingly into the audience, Chickenshed’s reworking of JM Barrie’s Christmas staple is sheer magic

JM Barrie’s tale about the boy who never wants to grow up has delighted audiences and readers since the early 1900s. It is a regular on the Christmas theatre programme but Chickenshed’s adaptation takes Barrie’s original, spins it, and makes it fly above and beyond all that has gone before.

Chickenshed have stuck to Peter Pan’s roots but made the act of telling stories a bigger feature. There’s a troupe of storytellers from today’s world who swoop into the main scenes to interfere and tug at their seams. But Peter Pan, Wendy and the rest of the Darling family remain familiar. Nana – their lovable dog, who also happens to be the children’s nanny – takes the form of a puppet made out of shredded strips of paper and is animated into life. Peter Pan, played by Demar Lambert soars into the air, somersaulting as he goes.