Whenever I hear that a new adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass is being made, whether in theatre or film, I react with very little enthusiasm.
Most often I worry that the adaptation will stress the well-mannered "English" nature of it excessively, and lose much of the haunting darkness that casts itself over so many scenes in the book; that it will force through its own interpretative critical agenda to the extent that so much resonance of the piece is lost. I can unequivocally say that this new adaptation for the stage succeeds by avoiding both of these dangers, whilst it remains innovative in its experimentation.
The opening scene, the prologue to the play, has a truly haunting quality to it: a lone, indistinct figure delivers the poem in a truly ethereal way as chill piano music accompanies him. One of the great features of the performance is the innovative use of the chorus. Not only does it provide a flexible selection of actors to play the characters Alice meets, but it is also able to narrate Alice's adventures and to reinforce with backing vocals and performance many of the play's poems and much of its action.
The performance of the play's poems especially reveal the power behind such a decision: “Jabberwocky", for instance, uses the vocal range offered by the chorus to switch from the haunting and mysterious, to the violent and animated, and then to the joyous, flowing easily into and out of each stage. Indeed the best aspect of this play is that it respects Carroll's own caveat, which he represents in the character of Humpty Dumpty: that a true understanding of the book and its poetry is not to be achieved through careful, academic analysis, but through an appreciation of the language itself, its sounds, and the emotions it conveys in those resonances.
Indeed the focus of the play through the quality of the acting, the brilliant, though at times incongruous, music, and the experimental set design and props, is always kept on the ridiculous and illogical world that Alice has slipped into, especially with the script's insistent preservation of the absurd paradoxes and contradictions throughout.
However, the play does seem to lack the shape (rather than unity: a quite absurd word in the chaotic world of the looking glass) that would be required in adapting such a book to the stage. Occasionally, too, one feels that it is too long and meandering to hold our interest constantly. The script, despite having many thematic touches of brilliance, should have been edited to a more manageable length. Moreover, on occasion the choreography of chaos falls below the standard one has come to expect from the rest of the play in terms of crafted absurdity.
However, if you wanted to see a play that combines both wit, darkness, and challenges to the secure reason of our existence in the strange and illogical reversed world of the looking glass, then you couldn't choose a better play to see, whose concepts are never betrayed by the quality of its acting and presentation.
by James Taylor
