When Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel’s reimagining of Peter Pan premièred here in 2015 it was warmly lauded, and rightly so. J M Barrie’s original is endlessly chopped and changed in various productions, but usually to remove its shadows (ahem) and turn it into inoffensive pantomime entertainment. Sheader and Steel have done the opposite. Barrie’s material is framed by scenes in a First World War field hospital, underlining that the Lost Boys of the 1904 play are exact contemporaries of the Lost Generation of 1914-18.

For those who expect a balmy, unchallenging summer evening in Regent’s Park, the opening minutes must be downright harrowing. Yet everything feeds into the fantasy which takes over as Nurse Darling reads Peter Pan to a sightless patient. The hospital beds form the musculature of Jon Bausor’s set, making everything from the original Wendy house to the treacherous Skull Rock (whose encroaching tides are represented by a group of Tommies). An irascible army captain marching into the ward, missing an eye and an arm, becomes Captain Hook. Even the “name” of one of the Lost Boys, Slightly Soiled, is pre-echoed in a patient’s toilet mishap. In front and below the main playing area, a signpost in a trench has the first two words of “No Mans Land” crossed out and replaced by “Never”.

None of this corrodes the adventure of the tale itself: as Peter and Wendy each partly declare, and as the young men in Flanders attest in the coda, both to die and to live are awfully big adventures. Sam Angell’s Peter leads the cast in flying sequences not on conventional wires but on bungees with a thrilling life of their own, Cora Kirk accommodates Wendy’s girlhood, the young womanhood of her nurse incarnation and the mothering which both are required to do for their charges. Dennis Herdman’s Hook leads a pirate crew decked out in an opulent assortment of threads that had me singing Adam and the Ants numbers under my breath, and Rachael Canning designs a huge composite puppet Crocodile and a Tinkerbell made principally out of storm lanterns. Even when bowdlerised, Peter Pan inescapably carries intimations of something deeper and greater; this version offers a compelling account of what that might be.

Written for the Financial Times.