Lewis Carroll’s novel was first adapted for the stage in 1886. There have been endless adaptations ever since: plays, musicals, operas, films, cartoons, ballets and even, ice spectaculars. The most recent is Tim Burton’s 3-D extravaganza. The best is, probably, still Dennis Potter’s 1985 screenplay, Dreamchild.
Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet, with music by Joby Talbot, starts on a summer’s afternoon in Oxford in 1862 with Henry Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church, and his wife hosting a garden tea party. It is the year Carroll first told the story to Alice Liddell and her sisters. In this version she is no longer a little girl but a teenager (Lauren Cuthbertson) with a crush on a young gardener (Federico Bonelli) who is wrongly accused of stealing tarts and given the sack. The opening Victorian setting (which may bring back memories of Frederick Ashton’s Enigma Variations) may also lead some purists to hope that designer Bob Crowley has gone to John Tenniel’s illustrations for the visual inspiration of the characters. Sadly, he has not and the costumes and makeup never look right.
The Royal Ballet offers a series of fantastical episodes, which, without Carroll’s word play, his verbal nonsense, puns, riddles and satire on Victorian logic and mathematics, lose their point. The production concentrates on spectacle, as opposed to choreography. The digital projections are effective when Alice falls down the vortex rabbit hole; but they do not solve the problem of how to make her first small and then tall.
In her dream Lewis Carroll (Edward Watson) becomes the White Rabbit and the gardener becomes the Knave of Hearts. The psychotic Queen of Hearts (Laura Morera) is never terrifying. She is conceived as a comic relation of the Red Queen in Ninette de Valois’s Checkmate and given a funny revue sketch parody of the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty. The Mad Hatter (Stephen McRae) is turned into a vaudeville tap dancer and makes his entrance through the proscenium arch of a Pollock’s Toy Theatre. The exotic caterpillar (Eric Underwood) has a manly physique and the female corps provide (an amusing touch, this) him with lots of shapely legs. The hedgehogs, played by children, are cute.
The huge Cheshire Cat has a squad of puppeteers to manipulate the separate bits and pieces which make up his head and body and which can be instantly taken apart and put together again. The Duchess’s kitchen would be perfect accommodation for Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett. Father William and Son, the Gryphon and Mock Turtle are noticeable by their absence. The strangest omission is the Lobster Quadrille. When Alice finally wakes up, instead of going back to 1862, the epilogue, ill-advisedly, jumps to the present day and has a modern Alice and her boyfriend on a day’s visit to Oxford. The ballet is far too long. There is too much padding and the jokes are over-extended. The dancing disappoints, failing to develop the characterisations. Wheeldon’s Alice is strictly for very young children; there’s nothing Freudian here to make parents worry and speculate why Mrs Liddell refused the Reverend Dodgson permission to take her children on another river trip. Has Matthew Bourne ever considered the two Alice novels as a project?