Mary Rose is a play by J.M. Barrie, who is best known for Peter Pan. It first played in London in May 1920.[1]
It tells the fictional story of a girl who vanishes twice.[1] As a child, Mary Rose's father takes her to a remote Scottish island. While she is briefly out of her father's sight, Mary Rose vanishes. The entire island is searched exhaustively. Twenty-one days later, Mary Rose reappears as mysteriously as she disappeared ... but she shows no effects of having been gone for three weeks, and she has no knowledge of any gap or missing time.
Years later, as a young wife and mother, the adult Mary Rose persuades her husband to take her to the same island. Again she vanishes: this time for a period of decades. When she is found again, she is not a single day older and has no awareness of the passage of time. In the interim, her son has grown to adulthood and is now physically older than his mother.
Barrie, who normally wrote with his right hand, wrote Mary Rose with his left hand due to a "writer's cramp".[2] Alfred Hitchcock saw the play in its original production, and wanted to film it, even asking Jay Presson Allen to write a screenplay after she wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Marnie (1964). However, Hitchcock was under contract to Universal Pictures which felt the project was not commercial enough.