Adaptations of Alice in Wonderland seldom work out well. They always sound intriguing, but normally fall disconsolately flat. Tim Burton’s 2010 film version sacrificed the book’s minimal narrative coherence and much of its heart at the altar of visual spectacle. Damon Albarn’s 2015 stage musical Wonder.land was a monotonously drawn-out parable about the dangers of teenagers being online too much. Even Walt Disney’s charming animation from 1951 languishes in the bottom half of everyone’s ranked Disneys.
The problem is not so much the story itself: children exploring magical lands is a theme full of promise, danger and delight. From The Wizard of Oz through The Phantom Tollbooth and any number of Hayao Miyazaki masterpieces, youngsters have been opening doors into strange gardens to great effect for decades. No, the problem is all the Alice accoutrements that get paraded before our eyes every time Lewis Carroll’s heroine takes to the stage or screen. Here they come, the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, like prizes on Bruce Forsyth’s conveyor belt in The Generation Game (and with the same amount of contemporary relevance), all gurning with a kind of empty glee, as if they hope we’ve never seen them before but know in their heart of hearts that we have.
Alice at the Asylum, written by and starring Lydia Vie, sets out to be a wildly original take on the Alice story, with a property developer coming across Alice and her magical menagerie of madness in an abandoned lunatic asylum that he’s just bought and is planning to demolish to make way for luxury apartments. Poor guy, he just wants to turn a handsome profit. But he has unwittingly wandered into a lion-pit full of embarrassingly over-the-top fringe theatre performers. With their staring eyes and exaggerated poses they look like a group of children’s entertainers who’ve done a crash-course in mime. The result is an excruciating sequence of tea-parties, bossy queens and a schizophrenic Hatter/Hare, all working to pummel some serious meaning into Carroll’s Victorian soufflé of a story. And, just as with all those previous attempts, it doesn’t work. As in the original novel, the house of cards collapses under its own self-importance. The final revelation is a neat twist, but it does not make up for the tedium that comes before.
Music is provided throughout by a Pierrot-made-up motionless figure with an electric guitar dominating the rear of the stage. Why he is there is never made clear. His rhythmic strumming does give the play a flicker of urgency, but the songs themselves are inexplicably poor: little more than single, repeated musical phrases. Just one of them wrested a round of applause from the audience this evening, and even that has to count as probably the most reluctant-sounding clapping I have ever heard at the end of a number.
The fact that Lydia Vie both acts Alice and wrote the play hints that there may be an element of vanity about this production, a suspicion further enhanced when we see in the programme that the director, Anastasia Revi, has personally trained several of the actors (including Vie), and deems her own importance great enough to include her photo and biography twice, on pages five and eleven. Unusually for a director, she also ran, uninvited, onto the stage at the end to take some of the applause for herself. In some ways, that was curiouser than anything Alice herself did all evening.
Alice in Wonderland is loved by millions, and one cannot blame its fans for wanting to reimagine it, or hunting for meaning beneath its surface. But it is an astonishingly delicate creation, a teetering edifice supported by the evanescent quality of sheer nonsense. The fact that it works, and that it continues to grip the imaginations of children across the world, is one of its greatest mysteries. But the alchemy is undeniable. Carroll’s verse, Tenniel’s illustrations, that particular flavour of 19th-century English ‘good behaviour’, of Nanny waiting in the nursery with tea before bed: they all conspire to create a one-off classic. But the moral from Alice at the Asylum, and so many adaptations before it, is clear: don’t mess with Alice.