As the two articles following this amplify, whatever one's views of its intrinsic merits, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan is open to a multiplicity of readings, and (notably since the RSC broke the mould in 1982) of stage interpretations – not to mention its co-option into Walt Disney's cartoon canon. Simon Trussler takes the play for a spin in such unaccustomed company as Romeo and Juliet and the almost contemporaneous ‘tragedy of childhood’ by Frank Wedekind, Spring Awakening, exploring the theme it sustains of betrayed childhoods, surrogate parenting, and changing attitudes towards grown men sleeping with small boys – a magical experience for Barrie, but much less comfortable for the singer Michael Jackson in his ranch called…Neverland. Simon Trussler is Co-Editor of New Theatre Quarterly and presently Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Rose Bruford College. His numerous books on drama and theatre include Shakespearean Concepts (Methuen, 1989), the award-winning Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (1993), The Faber Pocket Guide to Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (2006), and Will's Will: the Lives and Last Wishes of William Shakespeare (National Archives, 2007).

To consider racial difference in terms of exclusion enables whiteness to retain its relative invisibility. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of critical whiteness studies, Mary Brewer examines J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, exploring how the amorphous status granted to whiteness in the text lends it cultural authority. She aims to uncover how race and racism structure the play and to find ways of exploiting the gaps in its representation of white identity. These gaps potentially may be exploited in production – that is, made to operate against the grain and yield explicitly oppositional performances that work toward the denaturalization of hegemonic constructions of whiteness, gender, and sexuality. Mary Brewer lectures in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University. Her books include Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Women's Theatre (Sussex Academic Press, 1992) and Problems of Exclusions in Feminist Thought: Challenging the Boundaries of Womanhood (Sussex Academic Press, 2002).

John Doyle's centennial adaptation and direction of Peter Pan for the Oxford Playhouse in December 2004 provides the starting point for a fresh investigation of the play. As Clive Barker has placed the playing of games as central to the training of actors, so Doyle's setting for this production, which never departs from the Darling nursery, places games at the heart of his interpretation of this play about learning to act an adult part. The adult roles in Doyle's production all display a small element of Peter Pan, as their acting style requires them to step in and out of role, to demonstrate the playfulness of their actions, and so to resist growing up. These observations invite a backward glance at the ideological significance of play for late nineteenth-century thinkers about childhood. An exploration of playground and parlour games that formed a common currency of childhood experience during the late Victorian era is set against the documentary evidence of games which Barrie played with the Llewellyn Davies boys, and these in turn are shown to be not just manifest within Peter Pan itself, but also to afford the play a structural and ideological cohesion. Anne Varty is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and her monograph Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain will be published later this year.

Based in Poznań, Poland, Teatr Ósmego Dnia (Theatre of the Eighth Day) is now recognized not only as one of the most important companies in the history of Polish theatre, but as one of the leading avant-garde ensembles in the world. From its origins in a student theatre group of the late sixties, Theatre of the Eighth Day developed during the early seventies the artistically and socially radical methods of work and of living which have continued to be the hallmark of its work over four decades, but has remained in touch and in tune with the rapid changes in Polish life, first under martial law, and then in the new Poland of the ‘free market’ – towards which the company has sustained an attitude no less critical than to Communist authoritarianism. A number of its productions have accordingly left indelible marks on the sensitivities and even life choices made by two generations of Polish spectators. Juliusz Tyszka is Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. A contributing editor of NTQ, he has been a close witness of more than thirty years of the work of Theatre of the Eighth Day, and here sets the artistic development of the group in the changing context of Polish life and politics.