J. Μ. Barrie (1860–1937) is best remembered as the author of Peter Pan, which was first performed in London in 1904. In terms of Scottish traditions of writing he is also often cited as the founder of the ‘Kailyard School’. Its sentimental representations of rural Scottish life, starting from Barrie’s Auld Licht Idylls in 1888, were to be attacked by almost all the major writers of the early twentieth century, and were a stimulus to the dark realism of many Scottish novels that followed in the tradition established by George Douglas Brown’s anti-Kailyard tragedy, The House with the Green Shutters (1901).
As a result, Barrie has rarely been accorded the retrospective critical status that his enormous success as short-story writer, novelist and dramatist in his own lifetime might seem to require. The reason is that Barrie’s mixture of satire and whimsy, his play with the relations of childhood and adulthood, have seemed to many twentieth-century critics both to lack maturity and to imply a false view, in particular, of Scottish experience. In Mary Rose, for instance, the presentation of the Highlander, Cameron, combines what might seem to be a patronising presentation of his Gaelic-inflected speech — ‘That iss so, ma’am. You may haf noticed that I always address you as “ma’am”. It iss my way of indicating that I consider you a ferry genteel young matron’ — with a Stereotypie view of the Highlander as living in a world of the supernatural. Barrie’s art, however, depended on the exploitation and subversion of such stereotypes in order to undermine the certainties of modern life, both its confident scientific materialism and its belief in the stability of British social structures.
In Barrie’s plays, the stability and certainty of the modern world is always on the edge of disintegration, quivering on the brink of an alternative reality which is both more terrifying, but may also be more consoling, than the materialism which it displaces. Barrie’s use of the modern technology of the stage to dramatise these indeterminate states is particularly pronounced in Mary Rose.