The focus is on childhood in two West End plays I feel privileged to have seen in the past couple of weeks. The pair have, in fact, been widely hailed as the most impressive productions of the moment, along with The Audience, featuring Dame Helen Mirren’s latest crack at playing the Queen.

At the Noël Coward Theatre can be seen John Logan’s Peter and Alice, which focuses on the two people who, in childhood, supplied the inspiration for two great fictional characters. Peter Llewelyn Davies gave his name to (and, with his four brothers, the characteristic features of) J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Alice Liddell Hargreaves was muse — the word seems appropriate — to Lewis Carroll for Alice in Wonderland.

The Old Vic, meanwhile, is offering a startlingly good revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy, which I review today in Weekend. This tells, in thinly disguised form, the story of the legal and political battle to clear the name of a 13-year-old boy expelled from the Royal Naval College at Osborne for the alleged theft of a five shilling postal order.

This is a play, as it happens, that has a significant place in my own childhood. Aged 11, I took on the title role of Ronnie Winslow, the name Rattigan gave to cadet George Archer-Shee. This was exactly half a century ago, almost to the week, I realise as I write. Recollections of this school production remain vivid, however. I still possess the Longmans edition of the play and view with amusement the pencilled notes in childish scrawl charting my movements about the stage. Not many of these were strictly necessary, since Rattigan — like George Bernard Shaw before him — was lavish in his own instructions.

I recall asking the producer — this was before the days of ‘directors’ — for enlightenment over one command, that preceding, my very first line. My pre-teen brain had yet to grasp the meaning of ‘sang-froid’ — whether ‘ill-managed’, as here specified, or otherwise — which I was required to display in my greeting to the parlourmaid Violet.

I am too modest to report what was made of my performance at the time. Honesty compels me to admit, however, that no role I subsequently took in my school days gave similar satisfaction to audiences; and while my career choice might have done little to burnish the name of journalism, it can certainly never be judged a loss to the stage. For the Old Vic’s Ronnie, by contrast, a great future in the theatrical profession can confidently be forecast. At 16, in fact, Charlie Rowe is already something of a star. His previous roles include Billy Costa in the film version of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and, by an interesting coincidence, Peter Pan, in the 2011 television mini-series, Neverland.

Whether it is a nightly occurrence I know not, but the little ‘victory dance’ Charlie performed during the curtain call at the performance I saw proved most endearing. Its celebratory style was an apt reflection of the success of the production Seeing Peter and Alice last week prompted a re-reading of Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys — my first, I think, since this excellent book came out in 1979.

Birkin tells the story of Barrie’s mightily generous behaviour towards the five Llewelyn Davies brothers, who supplied his inspiration for Peter Pan. As Barrie said: “I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame.”

Barrie befriended the family after meeting the oldest of the boys in Kensington Gardens. He subsequently adopted them all following the early deaths of their parents, Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, from cancer.

One detail of the story that I had completely forgotten was that while four of the boys were educated at Eton, the second eldest, John — ‘Jack’ — was at Osborne Naval College.

In a story in which famous names abound, he went there through the influence of Captain Robert Falcon Scott (of Antarctic fame), who advised his friend Barrie of a vacancy. “My dear Scott, I know the right boy so well that it is as if I had been waiting for your letter,” the author wrote.

Jack went to Osborne (where he was markedly unhappy) in 1907. His fellow cadets included George Archer-Shee, though whether the two were acquainted, I do not know. It hardly seems possible, however, that Jack would not have known of the scandal that engulfed his colleague the following year.

Jack joined the Royal Navy and served in the North Atlantic during the First World War. He died in 1959, aged 65. George Archer-Shee, his name finally cleared by the courts, had a much shorter life. He was commissioned in the South Staffordshire Regiment at the start of the war, and died of wounds received in the first battle of Ypres in 1914.