John Doyle's centennial adaptation and direction of Peter Pan for the Oxford Playhouse in December 2004 provides the starting point for a fresh investigation of the play. As Clive Barker has placed the playing of games as central to the training of actors, so Doyle's setting for this production, which never departs from the Darling nursery, places games at the heart of his interpretation of this play about learning to act an adult part. The adult roles in Doyle's production all display a small element of Peter Pan, as their acting style requires them to step in and out of role, to demonstrate the playfulness of their actions, and so to resist growing up. These observations invite a backward glance at the ideological significance of play for late nineteenth-century thinkers about childhood. An exploration of playground and parlour games that formed a common currency of childhood experience during the late Victorian era is set against the documentary evidence of games which Barrie played with the Llewellyn Davies boys, and these in turn are shown to be not just manifest within Peter Pan itself, but also to afford the play a structural and ideological cohesion. Anne Varty is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and her monograph Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain will be published later this year.