Growing Up Is Optional: Peter Pan Jr.
Photo: Jane Booyse
It is easy, if you spend enough time watching South African theatre, to become a little gloomy about it. Houses are smaller than they used to be. Budgets are tighter. Every second conversation with someone in the industry seems to circle back to funding, or the lack of it. And then you sit down in a room like Die Centurion Teater on a Thursday night, surrounded by more than sixty performers between Grades 4 and 12, and the gloom simply evaporates. Whatever else is true about the state of theatre in this country, the pipeline is not the problem. The talent is there, in abundance, and it is being taken seriously.
That seriousness is the first thing worth saying about Scenario Youth's production of Peter Pan Jr. This was never going to be a shuffling school concert dressed up in pirate hats. It is a full-scale, professionally mounted musical, built from a cast of over a hundred hopefuls whittled down to the performers who eventually took the Centurion stage, and it carries itself with a polish that would not embarrass a much bigger budget. The show had already weathered one piece of real-world drama before opening: the young performer originally cast as Peter accepted an overseas opportunity partway through rehearsals, and a new Peter, just twelve years old, stepped into the role with what can only be described as sheer nerve. You would never have guessed at the late change from the seat. The confidence with which the part was carried, from the first cocky grin to the final, quieter moments with Wendy, suggested someone who has already logged more stage time than performers twice his age.
Photo: Jane Booyse
A Story That Refuses to Grow Old
Barrie's tale is, by now, so thoroughly embedded in the culture that there is a risk of taking it for granted: the boy who will not grow up, the children spirited out of their nursery window, the pirates and the crocodile and the ticking clock. What keeps drawing directors back to it, generation after generation, is that underneath the pixie dust sits something genuinely useful to think about. Growing up is not optional, but the parts of ourselves that let us play, imagine and believe things into existence do not have to be surrendered along the way. Directors Tiaan Kirsten-Lubbe and Lian Sachse lean into exactly that idea in their programme note, describing Neverland not as an escape from reality but as the world children build when the real one feels too big or too lonely. It is a lovely reframing, and it shows up on stage in small, thoughtful touches rather than heavy-handed moralising.
What struck me most, though, was the sheer scale of coordination on display. A cast this size could easily tip into chaos, with half the ensemble marking time while a handful of principals do the actual acting. That is not what happened here. Whether the moment belonged to the Darling nursery, the Lost Boys' hideout or a full pirate ship brawl, the performers not currently at the centre of the action were still working, still reacting, still listening to what was happening around them. It is a small thing to notice and a difficult thing to achieve, and it is precisely what made the busier ensemble numbers feel expansive rather than crowded. When forty-odd young performers commit to a scene at once, the stage genuinely does feel bigger than it is.
Humour runs right through the production, and it is handed out generously rather than hoarded by one or two comic performers. There is a lightness of touch to it, plenty of knowing winks and cheeky asides aimed as much at the grown-ups in the audience as the children, without ever curdling into the kind of broad, exhausting mugging that youth productions can sometimes lean on when they are not sure the jokes will land on their own. They landed. The Centurion crowd, packed with parents, grandparents and siblings, was laughing in the right places all night.
Photo: Jane Booyse
Puppets, Pirates and a Very Good Dog
If I have to pick a single favourite element of the evening, it is the puppetry. Nana the dog and the crocodile are two of the trickiest characters in any Peter Pan production to get right; done badly, they tip into pantomime silliness, and done well, they become the most theatrically alive things on stage. This production got them very right. The puppeteers working Nana and the crocodile brought real character and comic timing to both, and the crocodile's stalking of Captain Hook drew some of the biggest laughs of the night. It is exactly the kind of inventive, low-tech theatrical solution that reminds you why live puppetry so often beats CGI trickery for sheer delight, and it deserves to be flagged as a genuine highlight rather than a footnote.
The design work around it holds up its end too. Ashleigh Hilton's set and costumes do the necessary job of separating the domesticity of the Darling nursery from the wilder textures of Neverland without ever feeling like two disconnected productions stitched together, and Luigia Casaleggio's musical direction keeps favourites like "I Won't Grow Up" and "I Gotta Crow" bright and buoyant without letting the pace sag between numbers, which in a show with this many moving parts is no small achievement.
None of this is to say the production is flawless. With a cast this large and this young, there were, inevitably, moments where energy dipped slightly or a transition ran a touch long. But these are the sort of gentle, forgivable rough edges you expect and even welcome in youth theatre, evidence of a room full of children being stretched, trusted and given real responsibility rather than being wrapped in cotton wool. That is, in the end, the whole point of an initiative like this one, and it is worth saying plainly: watching a show built almost entirely around performers who are still in school, and watching it hold together this confidently, is genuinely heartening for anyone who cares about where South African theatre is headed next.
I left Die Centurion Teater humming "Never Never Land" halfway to the car, with a smile that did not really fade for the rest of the evening. That is precisely what a family musical is meant to do, and on that measure, and several others besides, this Peter Pan Jr. delivers in full. Take the kids, take your inner child, and go and remember what it felt like to believe that anything was possible if you just thought happy thoughts.
Peter Pan Jr. runs at Die Centurion Teater until the 15th of August 2026.