Johnny Cunningham’s music for Lee Breuer’s new take on Peter Pan was the start of a tragic Celtic love story

Karen Kandel narrates Mabou Mines' Peter and Wendy

LEE BREUER’S eyes fill with tears when he speaks about his late friend and collaborator, Scottish musician Johnny Cunningham, who died suddenly in New York in 2003. “It was such a tragedy,” he says. “Johnny was only 46 years old. He was such a charismatic man, a force of nature, cherished by audiences across the world. We all miss him so much. Boy, is he ever missed by so many people.”

Breuer, 72, is the maverick genius behind Mabou Mines, the avant-garde theatre company that returns to the Edinburgh International Festival next week with Peter and Wendy, an award-winning, hugely imaginative, puppet-filled take on JM Barrie’s enchanting story of Peter Pan.

It’s the profoundly moving Celtic connections behind Barrie’s troubling myth of lost innocence, about a boy who never grows up, that Breuer wants to focus on as his New York-based company – America’s oldest experimental theatre collective – is welcomed back to Scotland. Two years ago, they wowed Festival audiences with DollHouse, an astonishing version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in which all the male characters were played by very short men opposite unusually tall actresses.

In Peter and Wendy only one graceful actress, the multiple award-winning Karen Kandel, is centre stage. She’s the narrator as well as the voice of 27 characters in the play, including Peter, Wendy, Captain Hook, the pirates, even the Darling family dog Nana.

A beautiful, slender African-American, Kandel shares the stage with two forms of puppetry: bunraku, a Japanese discipline that employs doll-like puppets on sticks manipulated by strings, and wayang kulit – Indonesian shadow puppets – all of whom move to Cunningham’s haunting score for fiddle, Celtic harp, flutes and percussion, sung by Susan McKeown. The music is played live by five musicians. “It’s just kinda magical,” says Breuer.

Portobello-born Cunningham – who was integral to the worldwide success of bands such as Silly Wizard, Relativity, Raindogs and Nightnoise – was universally acknowledged as perhaps “the greatest living Scottish fiddler”, notes Breuer emotionally. Cunningham was commissioned to compose the score by writer and producer Liza Lorwin, who created the stage adaptation of Barrie’s novel, with designer Julie Archer, who has produced a set that looks like a child’s oversize pop-up book.

Therefore, Mabou Mines’s version of Peter Pan bears no resemblance to the thigh-slapping pantomimes we see every Christmas featuring a froth of soap stars, with a female lead flying about in emerald green tights, a scenery-chomping, cutlass-wielding Captain Hook and a Tinkerbell tricked out in pink fairy chiffon and a pair of sequinned wings.

Rather, Breuer’s company has come up with something much darker, much richer and much closer to Barrie’s poignant humanity and his deep-seated melancholy. It is also an adaptation that acknowledges the essence of Barrie’s Scottishness – Barrie was born (and is buried) in Kirriemuir. And, as Breuer says: “His stories were always inspired by his homeland.”

After first meeting Lorwin and Archer in a Brooklyn coffee shop in the late 1980s, and agreeing to direct the production, Breuer suggested they should work with a Scottish composer to amplify the mellifluous lilt in Barrie’s prose, because the novel is such “a f***ing masterpiece and so f***ing Scottish”.

“The language of the novel is much more rhythmic and evocative if read in Scots,” agrees Lorwin, who recalls visiting Archer in Minneapolis in 1989, when they first began working seriously on the piece, and borrowing every single traditional Scottish record from local branch libraries. “We noticed a lot of Silly Wizard and in particular two Relativity albums that were firmly rooted in traditional music but they also had an innovative emotional and lyrical feel. We just knew we wanted that sound.”

The next step was to bring Cunningham in as the composer two years later, although Lorwin laughs when she remembers how she called both Johnny and the accordionist Phil Cunningham, who also played with Silly Wizard, unaware that they were brothers. “We love both Cunninghams,” she stresses.

However it helped that Johnny was living in America and had just finished touring with Raindogs. “And he wanted to do something different,” says Breuer when we meet in Brooklyn, where DollHouse is playing its final performance to packed houses at St Ann’s Warehouse.

The curtain is finally coming down on a show that has enjoyed critical and commercial success internationally. He stresses that Peter and Wendy is a very different piece. “Time to move on,” says the stocky, still muscular Breuer. He will be workshopping extensively with the National Theatre of Scotland on their Peter Pan project while Mabou Mines is at the Festival.

Peter and Wendy has had a long life – it’s played the Spoleto Festival, the International Festival of Puppetry at New York’s Public Theater, the Dublin International Theatre Festival and has had several long runs in Manhattan, as well as touring across the US.

One of the great gifts of the journey to Neverland and back was the fact that a folkie like Cunningham was willing to join forces with such an anarchic theatre company. “The big revelation about Johnny was his theatricality – it’s there in his albums, of course, but we had no idea that he would respond to us the way he did, writing the most amazing score. He committed so deeply to us, always playing live at every performance, with all the wonderful musicians he brought in – many of them Irish, by the way.

“Johnny was a huge influence on this show. He brought a tough, dry Scottish sensibility to Peter and Wendy and he had such a gentle sense of humour, a sweetness. I even got to write a song with him – the final song, 2 is the Beginning of the End, which was an enormous privilege,” says Breuer.

As Breuer pauses to gather his emotions, Lorwin interjects: “Look, Johnny was, indeed, still is, the beating heart of Peter and Wendy. I too got to write a song with him – the Wendy House Song.”

Whenever he listens to Cunningham’s music, Breuer says, he weeps: “His music tells you what to feel and how to feel. We had all these plans to work on other things together.

“We were devastated by Johnny’s death, so bringing it to Scotland is very emotive for us – it’s his memorial, a tribute in the memory of a remarkable man who died much too soon. It was Johnny’s dream for this show to be performed in Scotland. It’s just too bad he won’t be with us – but I guess he will be through the magic of his music.”

“We all lost a little piece of our hearts the day he died,” says Lorwin. “We would never have had Peter and Wendy without him.” So is Lee Breuer the Peter Pan of American theatre?

“No, he is not,” exclaims Lorwin, who has worked with him for two decades, as well having been his lover for a while. She also has a grown-up son, Mojo, with Breuer, who has five children with four different women. “He’s Captain Hook,” she adds. “A wild man.”

Breuer gives her an old-fashioned but fond look. Then he sighs and says: “Whatever. We’re all dolls anyway.”

• Peter and Wendy is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 2-5 September, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival

Review: Peter and Wendy