THE NIGHT LIGHTS blink three times and are extinguished; the curtains quiver, the window blows open and into the room flies a boy clad in cobwebs and autumn leaves. Ever since Peter Pan first flew on to the stage in 1904, he has been rhapsodised about, criticised, psychoanalysed, even demonised as the concept of a sick imagination. What he has never been is forgotten.

This month we have a West End revival of J. M. Barrie’s play and a $100 million big-screen Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up, whisking young Wendy off to Neverland to mother his gang of Lost Boys while he battles Captain Hook. Next year sees the film, J. M. Barrie’s Neverland, with Johnny Depp as the author, offers a fictionalised account of how he wrote this enduring play.

For years, Barrie’s myth has been filtered and fuelled for us by prancing pantomime figures on visible wires. Walt Disney turned Peter into a sanitised elfin creature for his 1953 cartoon version, which also featured a Tinkerbell inspired by Marilyn Monroe. Steven Spielberg’s treacly swashbuckler Hook (1991) had Robin Williams’s grown-up Pan returning to Neverland to release his inner child.

In Barrie’s Peter Pan, however, eternal youth is a bittersweet blessing; its price is the final loneliness of not having a family of one’s own. His Peter is exuberant, irresponsible, vain; Barrie knew that children can be thoughtlessly cruel and amoral, and that childhood can be a very scary state. “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” realises his hero.

“Barrie didn’t write some twee Edwardian entertainment,” says Steven Dexter, the director of the latest West End revival. “In his early drafts, Hook did not even feature. Peter, this figure who lures other people’s children, was originally the villain.”

Such details as Wendy’s divided loyalties between her meek father and the dangerous pirate, roles traditionally played by the same actor, have often been lost in productions starring ageing ingénues in green tights. But Wendy’s conflicting emotions are the key to Peter Pan, according to Jason Isaacs, who plays Hook in P. J. Hogan’s new movie version.

Isaacs has described Neverland as a place in Wendy’s head in which Peter represents “all the wonderful and terrible things about childhood”. Hook “is all the terrifying and seductive things about growing up” but “is strangely attractive and looks suspiciously like her own father. It’s all a Freudian nightmare for everyone involved.”

Barrie himself frequently used the language of psychoanalysis to explain away his creation: “Nothing of importance ever happens to us after the age of 12,” he would say. Freud, for his part, would have had a field day with Barrie. The writer’s elder brother, David, died tragically when he was 13 — an event from which his mother never recovered — and Barrie himself stopped growing at the age of 14, at 5ft.

A journalist, novelist and dramatist, Barrie became the most successful playwright of his day with such hits as The Admirable Crichton and Dear Brutus as well as Peter Pan. When he died in 1937, he left more money than Kipling, Hardy and Conan Doyle.

Despite this success, the childless Barrie was a moody character who seemed happiest in the company of boys: “Grow up — and have to give up marbles — awful thought,” he wrote in an early notebook.

His favourite boys became the Llewellyn Davies children, sons of a family friend, whom he adopted after their parents died. In the dedication to the published play, he wrote that he had made Peter Pan by “rubbing the five of them violently together as savages with two sticks to produce a flame”.

The impact on the boys was immense. Peter Llewellyn Davies, teased mercilessly at Eton, developed a phobia about his association with the play, which he dubbed “that terrible masterpiece”. A deeply unhappy man, even his suicide in 1960 was reported as “The boy who never grew up is dead”.

It’s hard now to imagine that Peter Pan first appeared in an adult novel, The Little White Bird (1902), about a childless writer who befriends a child called David. On walks in Kensington Gardens he tells stories about a flying boy who leads dead children to an afterlife, a child’s paradise.