Updating Lewis Carroll’s classic story has seldom paid dividends for theatre-makers. Despite a wealth of talent on board, including Damon Albarn as composer, even Rufus Norris came a bit of a cropper with the NT’s Wonder.land for the Manchester international festival. But stripping the novel of its Victorian trappings, Mike Kenny’s new adaptation offers a recognisable version of the original while making it seem sharply contemporary.
The cleverness is in the framing device in which the dream becomes an anxiety nightmare experienced by teenager Alice (Abby Wain) on the night before she is due to take a potentially life-changing exam. Without in any way pushing the point, Kenny slyly makes the show a comment on our results-driven school system and the pressure experienced by children who feel that if they muck up a test their opportunities will telescope down. It’s no surprise that the school head (Joanna Brown) is also the despotic Queen of Hearts.
For Alice’s mother (Elizabeth Eves), cleverly doubled with the Duchess, it’s about giving her daughter the social mobility and opportunities that she herself has lacked in her job as a cook. One of the best moments comes towards the end when the Duchess’s recollection of her school days and the Lobster Quadrille segues into Alice asking her mother to teach her how to dance. The reminder is that this older woman was once an Alice too.
The scene has an emotional charge that sometimes feels lacking in Sarah Brigham’s staging. Nonetheless it brims with shoestring invention and echoes resonantly with the Caterpillar’s (central question to Alice: who are you? Supplemented by youngsters from the theatre’s youth theatre, the excellent cast of actor-musicians offer various answers in a production in which up to four Alices of differing sizes are sometimes on stage at the same time. “Will I measure up?” sings Alice, always feeling she is either too big or too small. It mirrors teenage anxieties about forging an identity and finding their place in the world.
Ivan Stott’s score is tuneful, and the show plays to the dislocating sense of a dream world where everyday realities leak into the subconscious. Tweedle Dum (Paula James) and Tweedle Dee (John Holt Roberts) are a couple of school bullies; the White Rabbit (Jack Quarton) is the exam-room invigilator, anxious to ensure that pupils will not be late. The garden into which Alice is so keen to gain access could be seen as the adult world, which of course turns out to be a treacherous, confusing place but one that Alice is increasingly equipped to navigate.
The show doesn’t always capture all the witty absurdity of the original, and inevitably the updating renders it more mundane and less wondrous. Neither does it entirely sidestep the episodic nature of the narrative in which Alice is acted upon but doesn’t have real agency. But this Alice ends up a different person to the one who falls down the rabbit hole of the unconscious.
- At Derby theatre until 7 January. Box office: 01332 593939.
