AFTER The Railway Children and The Wind In The Willows, York playwright Mike Kenny is completing a hat-trick of new adaptations of children’s classics for York Theatre Royal with Peter Pan.

This family production opens on Friday as the summer-holiday centrepiece of the In The Round ensemble season, wherein Mike gives a new lease of life to JM Barrie’s enchanting tale of the boy who refused to grow up.

“I’ve wanted to do Peter Pan for a long time as I read it as a kid, and then I discovered it began as a play before the novel,” says Mike. “Barrie wrote it for the stage – it first appeared in 1907 – and he kept working on it after that.

“For example, there’s an epilogue that we’re including in which Peter Pan comes back once more and finds Wendy has grown up and now has a child – because Pan has no concept of the passing of time – but originally that epilogue was only performed on one night.”

Mike recalls first seeing a stage production of Peter Pan in the 1950s.

“What I most remember is the pirates and Nana, the dog, but I also remember being slightly disturbed because there’s an awful lot about gender in the story, what with Wendy playing mother and Peter Pan never growing up. And then you have the Lost Boys, who essentially have died… and of course it was quite disturbing to see Pan played by a woman.”

Mike has worked from Barrie’s play and novel to create his new adaptation. “Some of it is my own invention too,” he says. “There were things in the play where Barrie’s not always in control of it, whereas I’ve made it clear that Neverland is kind of an extension of a child’s fantasy game,” he says.

“It’s almost as if the game actually becomes real for the children, which is partly indicated by the space we are working in, so that the nursery and Neverland are overlapping each other and occasionally you will see things in Neverland and the house at the same time.”

One of Mike’s significant innovations is to build on the already established parallel between the children’s father, Mr Darling and Captain Hook, by finding a match for Mrs Darling.

“We now have a similar parallel, though it’s a tentative one, between the mother and Tinkerbell, so it’s almost as if Hook and Tinkerbell are the shadow versions of the parents,” says Mike. “As you know, I tend to go to the dark side in my adaptations.

“The mother also doubles with Tiger Lily, so in this game world, the parents are constantly present.”

Central to his adaptation is his interpretation of the character of Peter Pan. “Peter is a kind of Dionysus figure. There’s an unpredictable wildness about him, so like Dionysus he is a spirit of misrule, which runs through all children,” says Mike. “Parents tend to forget that, but it’s also part of adult life too.”

• Peter Pan runs at York Theatre from Friday until September 3. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk