Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones on an enigmatic mumming show by the author of Peter Pan

After watching a rehearsal of J M Barrie's Mary Rose in 1919, the octogenarian Thomas Hardy wrote some lines on the playwright's apparent indifference to the theatre's "mumming show":

If any day a promised play
Should be in preparation
You never see friend J M B
Depressed, or in elation.

But with a stick rough, crook'd, and thick,
You may sometimes discern him,
Standing as though a mumming show
Did not at all concern him.

Barrie, too, at 60, was now elderly, and his late great melodrama shares with Hardy's late great lyrics an intensely uncomfortable obsession with the fragile boundaries that separate the living from the missing and the dead. We mourn our dead, and feel sure that we want them back. Yet if those we so miss were to return one day, unchanged and undeveloped by the passage of a quarter of a century, there would be no place for them among their now elderly friends. "Would you mind telling me why everyone is so old?" Mary Rose asks the middle-aged man whom she cannot recognise as her once lost baby. When Barrie wrote Mary Rose, the Great War had just reaped its harvest of young lives in the fields of France. Yet the play concerns a missing girl, not a missing young man, and in its long opening stage direction, Barrie says of the stolid old woman who is looking after the house where Mary Rose grew up: "Even the war, lately ended, meant very little to her." Characteristically, Barrie reduces warfare to a jolly sport for the kind of men who are determined to be forever boys, such as Mary Rose's crass but amiable husband, Simon, with his delight in the navy, or his cheery son Harry, who runs away to sea at the age of 12.

It seems that when Barrie wrote Mary Rose, he was gazing towards worlds far away from the vacuously bourgeois southern England, now top-heavy with elderly people and their daughters who had lost sons, sweethearts and husbands. One such world was a poeticised version of his native Scotland, and especially its "misty Hebrides" and their outermost islands-beyond-islands. More practically, rough stick in hand, he contemplated Scotland's greatly superior education - he had just become rector of St Andrew's University. In the current production at London's Tabard Theatre, the gentle crofter Cameron (Scott McKellar) raises surprised laughter with his excellent grasp not just of fish cookery, but of French and Greek, followed by his revelation that both he and his father are studying for university degrees.

But most famously, in this once hugely successful play, Barrie was gazing towards a mysterious limbo of the missing and the dead - a fairy place, another Never Never Land, an enchanted island of rowan trees, deep waters and vanishing children. Even if it doesn't quite equate with heaven, the "Island that Likes to Be Visited" is, according to those who have been there, "lovely, lovely, lovely" - though lonely. There are faint hints that it may also offer refuge from something darkly sinister. Mary Rose's opening words - "I'm frightened . . . I am most afraid of my daddy" - are never fully explained.

Like the elusive Mary Rose herself, Two Colour Theatre Company's excellent production has vanished and reappeared. It was played to much acclaim last spring. For those who missed it then, it's well worth a pilgrimage to Turnham Green. The play takes on fresh resonances as, once again, many people experience the chilling effect of the words "missing, presumed dead". The Tabard Theatre's intimate playing space and charming Arts and Crafts decor suit Barrie's play perfectly, with the original William de Morgan tiles providing part of the backdrop. The play is simply but inventively staged by Hamish Gray (who also plays the revenant Harry, who searches for a mother but discovers only a child), with especially subtle use of an elegant translucent screen that functions, at the end, to divide the dead from the living. Among the strong cast of eight, Tracy Jewitt stands out as the splendidly tragicomic Mrs Morland. Rosa Blacker's Mary Rose seems rather more neurotic and damaged than the "rare and lovely flower" described by Barrie, but a modern audience would probably find Barrie's original conception unbearably saccharine. Contrary to Barrie's instructions, she lets out a blood-curdling scream after the line "Where is my baby?", which peals agonisingly through the Tabard's small space. It must disturb the after-work tipplers in the tavern below, and I hope it will prompt some of them to come up and witness Barrie's enigmatic "mumming show" for themselves.

Mary Rose is at the Tabard Theatre, London W4 (020 8995 6035), until 8 December

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