First, some context for those to whom the title doesn’t speak volumes. In 1932, Harold Arlen wrote the music and Yip Harburg and Billy Rose the lyrics for a song that was to be the only song in an unsuccessful Broadway play. That song was entitled: If You Believed in Me. The following year, the song was recycled in a film, having been retitled: It’s Only a Paper Moon, and Paul Whiteman recorded a version later that year became a hit. During the later years of the Second World War, many artists recorded versions, including Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman.

Speaking of changing names, my second sentence could have spoken, not of Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg and Billy Rose, but of Hyman Arluck, Isidore Hochberg and William Rosenberg, but that’s a whole other story.

Let’s have a listen to Ella’s version. She is backed, incidentally, by the incomparable vocal group The Ink Spots. Now, I know many of you don’t follow these links (which are, I admit, often simply pleasant diversions, and nothing more than the musical equivalent of serving suggestions). However, in this particular case, I’m trying to build an argument of which Ella’s version is, I believe, a significant part. So go on, click the link; it won’t bite.

OK. Now imagine for a moment… (Listen, you spent last week’s blog laughing at my travails in Portugal; it’s time you did some work yourselves.)…Just imagine for a moment that you speak no English. If you heard that song, how, just judging from the tune, the arrangement and Ella and the Ink Spots’ delivery, would you describe the mood of the song? To me, it sounds far more cheerful than wistful. If you listen to Nat King Cole, or Sinatra, they are, if anything, even chirpier.

Now let’s look at the lyrics (including the 8-line intro that I haven’t been able to find in any recorded version)   

I never feel a thing is real
When I’m away from you
Out of your embrace
The world’s a temporary parking place

Mmm, mm, mm, mm
A bubble for a minute
Mmm, mm, mm, mm
You smile, the bubble has a rainbow in it

Say, its only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me

Yes, it’s only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me

Without your love
It’s a honky-tonk parade
Without your love
It’s a melody played in a penny arcade

It’s a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me

This seems to be a tale of unrequited love, a bittersweet reflection on how empty life’s pleasures seem because the object of the singer’s love does not return that love. Yes, they are in a relationship – the singer speaks of ‘your embrace’ and says that ‘you smile’. However, the other person is not truly invested in the relationship, and it is that lack of investment that makes everything phony. For the singer, the default state is that the moon and sky, and love, are real.

What makes it even more interesting is that, in the Broadway play for which it was written, the song was sung by a character who was a barker for the Coney Island theatre; in other words, he walked the boardwalk trying to persuade passers-by to buy tickets for the theatre vaudeville performances. He knew that this (honky-tonk, Barnum and Bailey) vaudeville that he was selling had no intrinsic value, but his job was to persuade the punters that it did. The song argues that if you believe it has value, then it actually does.

The first word of the chorus – ‘Say, it’s only a paper moon’ – is seldom heard on recordings, but it seems to me to subtly change the balance of the song. It can be understood to mean: Yes, it’s only a paper moon, but I believe it also hints at: You may say it’s only a paper moon; however, if you believed in me, it would be real.

What started me thinking about the song was a couple of stage plays that Bernice and I have seen recently. We have a subscription to ntathome, the British National Theatre’s streaming service that makes available a rolling selection of several of their productions filmed during live performance. Now, watching a live theatre performance captured on camera is not the same as seeing it in the theatre, and some of the productions we have seen have survived the transition less successfully than others.

Broadly speaking, intimate theatre fares less well, because the emotional projection that is necessary for an actor to reach the back row of a theatre often looks ‘stagey’ and exaggerated when viewed in close-up. However, farce, spectacle and ‘dramatic’ narrative usually come across well. Adaptations of Frankenstein and Jane Eyre, or, to take something completely different, One Man, Two Guvnors,for example, all ‘transferred’ very successfully. Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, lost, in translation, all of the languid sexuality of the Egyptian scenes in what had been a highly-praised production.

The two productions we have seen recently are WarHorse and Peter Pan. The first is a very simple story of a youth and a horse who form a close bond until the horse is drafted into the cavalry during World War I, but who (spoiler alert) are ultimately reunited in France. What is remarkable about the stage adaptation of the original novel is the puppetry. I won’t attempt to describe it, but rather ask you to watch a short trailer illustrating how the horses (and a very characterful farmyard goose) were created on stage. You will have to take my word for it that, when we were watching the play, we ceased to notice the puppeteers, and this despite the fact that, as you can see for yourselves, there is no attempt to conceal them. The fact is that, if you believe the horses are real, they become real…which is, I would argue, the way all theatre works.

Anyone who has performed on stage knows that, from the back, the most elaborate stage set is revealed as just a paper moon. However, viewed from the front, it can poersuade us that it is real, if only we are prepared to believe. Whether using a hyper-realistic set, with all of the trickery of modern lighting effects and other techniques, or a minimalist set, leaving almost everything to the audience’s imagination, every play asks for, and requires, the audience’s willingness to be deceived…and then it becomes real.

I don’t pretend to know how this works. How is it that we can sit in Row 25 of a theatre, part of an audience of several hundred, and watch what is ostensibly happening in the drawing room of a house, whose fourth wall has been removed so that we can see in, and believe that what we are seeing is real? Believe it so completely that it can make our pulse race or move us to tears of despair or joy? It remains, for me, one of the most blissful mysteries of art.

And so to Peter Pan. I find myself mildly surprised that I have been writing this blog for over two years and haven’t yet mentioned Peter Pan. The fact is that I have long felt that the story of the boy who never grew up is one of those remarkable tales that resonates. Like all the greatest fairy tales, it touches upon profound truths about the human condition, and, also like them, it has attracted to itself several variations on the story that drink from the same well of humanity. I am especially fond of Spielberg’s Hook and Mark Forester’s Finding Neverland adapted from Alan  Knee’s play The Man Who Was Peter Pan. Both celebrate the creative genius of J M Barrie and find new regions to explore in Neverland.

The production of Peter Pan that we recently saw was devised by the company, and included several interesting deviations from the standard Peter Pan conventions. It is traditional for the actor playing Mr Darling to double as Captain Hook. If Peter Pan represents the child in all of us, then this double-casting naturally invites the exploration of the tension between children and their fathers. In the National Theatre production, Mrs Darling doubled as Hook (and a chillingly bloodthirsty job she made of it, too). This introduced even more fascinating Oedipal elements into the story.

However,the main reason why I mention the production here is because of the way it handled the flying that is an essential part, and a technical challenge, for anyone staging Peter Pan. In this production, the flying wires were far thicker than they often are, and the technique used was not the standard one of flying technicians in the wings letting out and pulling in the wires, but rather of counter-balancers being harnessed to the other end of the wire and racing up and down scaffolding that was set onstage, so that the mechanism was completely visible.

The same transparency was true throughout the production, with pirates in small rowing boats that ran on castors across the stage, and were propelled by the actors scooting with their paddles. The crocodile was a minimalist, unrealistic pair of jaws that emerged through the stage trapdoor; the pirate ship was a barely disguised rubbish skip. And it all worked absolutely perfectly, because, if you believe in fairies, and clap loudly enough, then Tinkerbell won’t die. (Spoiler alert: ‘she’ doesn’t die…and this is a Tinkerbell like no other you’ve ever seen: Julia Roberts he ain’t.)

It’s only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea.

But if you believe in it, it isn’t make-believe; it’s great theatre; and it’s one of the most exhilarating and life-affirming experiences I know. Seeing it onscreen is definitely second best, but second best can still be pretty wonderful.

Of course, some people don’t even have to go to a screen to believe.