Theatre

Alice in Wonderland

Tron, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

***

DOWN the narrow stairs, and into the dimly-lit basement where the bric-a-brac memories of childhood are lurking in the shadows. In Blue Raincoat’s current take on Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical classic, this is where Older Alice (Hilary Bowen-Walsh) comes in search of the Wonderland dreamscape she fell into on a hot summer’s day long ago. Look - there’s Younger Alice (Miriam Needham). coming centre-stage to act out the narrative voiced by her adult self... Not exactly curiouser and curiouser but on occasions confusing when - needs must with a cast of only six - Bowen-Walsh’s recall plays tricks and she morphs into the Dormouse and subsequently the Mock Turtle.

Like Older Alice, Ireland’s Blue Raincoat Theatre Company is looking back. In 1999, they staged a version of Alice in Wonderland adapted by Jocelyn Clarke: the bones of that script remain but director Niall Henry’s brooding revival has, in a way, looked grimly to Barrie’s Peter Pan and that pang of realisation - childhood has gone, Neverland/Wonderland are no longer within reach of your down-to-earth adult imagination. There is no deliciously eccentric magic, instead the hallucinatory blurring of logic has a sinister edge that stymies the whimsy. And why do both Alices have to pell-mell through their lines, rushing and shouting as if time was truly running out for them? Only the Mock Turtle’s slow aria in ironic praise of bea-yoo-ti-ful soo-oup allows the pace to draw breath, otherwise the cast - who shift characters valiantly in the switch of a bonnet or prop - are similarly driven to throw cadences, linguistic grace notes and vocal versatility into the wings. Vestiges of Carroll’s Wonderland do emerge in Paul McDonnell’s set designs that play brilliantly with differences in scale when Alice’s height acts up (and down!). Overall, however, there’s a gloom that short-changes the energies of childhood and kowtows to adult nostalgia for the way they were.