"Second to the right and straight on till morning!"

It hurt me to be walking out of the King's Theatre regretting the last two hours or so on Wednesday. This was the first time I'd seen Peter Pan on the theatrical stage and I was really excited to be seeing a story I hold close to my heart. There were some brilliant moments in the play where you could catch a glimpse of what John Tiffany and David Grieg were seeing but it was marred by a huge mess of a cumbersome set (though I was impressed when they transformed into sails) and a huge lack of imagination for such a magical story.

You might as well have driven a knife in my gut when the push along dog came onto the stage. I am sure that a real dog is against health and safety protocol but anything, anything would have been better than that thing. I was expecting at least a guy in a dog suit. The maids were ridiculous and I felt sorry for every kid in there. In fact I felt sorry for everybody.

Stage movements were awkward, the revolving chunks took up so much space the actors had no freedom and the ugly harnesses did not help in the slightest. And excuse me, Mr Tiffany, what were you thinking when you took out that beautiful scene when Pan leads Wendy, John and Michael out of their window across the sky? It was like walking into the Sistine Chapel only to find the Creation of Adam rubbed out of the ceiling!

The feeling I always got from Peter Pan was that it's timeless. The Forth Road Bridge whacked a certain date and era on it and yes, yes I know that every version has the characters donned in some sort of Victorian costume but mainly they are in their nightclothes and the point is meant to be their time spent in Neverland. The time in this story is meant to be fluid as water and so why the huge emphasis on something that is essentially unimportant? Do we really care about where Mr Darling works? Not really.

The fourth wall was broken when Tink made her entrance and I loved it. She came in from the top right balcony and onto the stage. That was a millisecond of a whole audience being enveloped in magic but they should have had more of this. Peter flying across the theatre would have been amazing or am I being to ambitious and dreamy? But I really loved their interpretation of Tinkerbell. The flame was ingenious - a person would have been too big and awkward to capture the essence of the fairy. A flame meant her size was small, but her spirit is just as big as your imagination. It meant she could fly all over the stage on an invisible wire, enticing the audience into the true magic of Peter Pan.

The violence was a little shocking. I'm not saying I was expecting an a neat and polite conversation between Hook and Pan but I was disappointed at the lack of elegant parrying with respectable swords and was left instead with taste of fist fighting and animal aggressiveness. I would have just stood on Queen Street at 3am to observe the drunk lads getting hot under the collar if I really wanted to see all that...

However, there is a brilliant scene when Pan is pushed off the plank into the swell of the ocean. It was FABULOUS. Everything just went perfectly together. People ran onto the stage to push him down further into the growl of the sea, created by strong blue lights cast onto the bottom half the stage, Guthrie struggles against the men/sea, the music pounded and Peter shot into a yellow beam which showed in a split second he was resurfacing. Beautiful!

Though call me traditional, but where was the epic kiss with Wendy and Peter? I missed that. There were gaps like these all over the place and as a result the play felt rather bleak and empty, with the lack of romance and it was top heavy with creepy violence, with no gentle love to balance it out.

There was a certain potent energy in Kevin Guthrie (Pan) and it was interesting to see his sinister anger mix with his childish cheekiness but this was lost with stuttered dialogue between characters and an unconvincing relationship with every character, especially Wendy and Captain Hook. (Why on earth did they make Hook able to 'fly'? That is just completely made up.) The most chilling moment though, was at the very last moment, you suddenly see a flash of the past and the future all at once when Wendy's nine year old daughter wakes to ask Pan 'why are you crying?' as did her mother all those years ago. Guthrie lets out another howl and you are haunted by the thought that it will happen all over again..

I'll just stay with my battered book and let my imagination tell me the story when I look at the painting of the fairies dancing around Peter on the wall at home....