December 9, 2009
Given the intimate association of Oxford with Alice, Tuesday night’s decent-sized OFS audience must have come in most cases not to meet but to renew acquaintance with Lewis Carroll’s larger than life characters who move in their anarchic world that’s paradoxically underpinned by a logic of their own making.
The commendably informative programme offers the intriguing vision of a structure being imposed upon the disorder, in that Carroll’s pre-adolescent Alice is here an adolescent who does battle with her teenage angst and teeming imagination; and these are personified by the characters she meets on her underground trip. I assume the preference by joint directors Alice Evans and Samantha Knipe for Carroll’s original title of Adventures Underground rather than the later in Wonderland makes reference to their intention.
Things get off to an attractive start with the 14-strong company performing if not a lobster quadrille then something like it as the audience takes its seats, and then there’s a burst of frantic action and blaze of light as the gaily-costumed components of Alice’s troubled psyche come forward and identify themselves – neurosis, depression and so on. The pace is furious, the sound level high and the cramped OFS space peopled by hurrying bodies – the constant movement, exits and entrances creates a helter-skelter effect.
And this rush and noise continues more or less at the same pitch for the remainder of the short 1 hour 15 mins show (there’s no interval). By the hour mark I was longing for an interval or just for a pause so that Alice might engage one-to-one with the larger-than-life beings whom she meets and who have entered our language and consciousness. Instead, an intermittent and to my mind redundant narrative is handed from actor to actor as Alice and the rest mill about on stage and on the upper levels to side and rear, often declaiming at the top of their voices to no good effect.
The psychological take on the story soon loses its force as it’s hard to distinguish between the various characters by costume or voice. I’m happy to blame myself for not identifying the March Hare until almost the end, but the other characters are mostly dull or anonymous, quirky but to no particular purpose. The Mad Hatter's tea party flits by practically unnoticed. The Queen of Hearts has energy and, appropriately, the voice of a town crier, but she’s soon shot her bolt ad dwindles away as her performance is all on one level.
Alice looks fine with her long tresses and band, the pre-teen’s pinafore dress turned here into rebellious leggings and smock-top, but her dialogue amounts to little more than a spot of rhetoric, and the overriding impression is of blandness. I found myself desperately hoping (in vain) for a guest appearance by Tweedledum and Tweedledee; and where on earth was Humpty Dumpty, the greatest of all Carroll’s creations, that master of crazy logic and blown-up bladder of egotism?
Tuesday’s performance took place pretty much in a laughter-free zone, I’m afraid, and there was a feeling that the frantic jollity on stage was passing a largely unmoved audience by. One final thought – this is no Christmas show; it’s not likely to appeal to many children since simple verbal and visual humour are thin on the ground, and judging by the audience opinion I canvassed after the show, it is likely to struggle to make a positive impact on adults as well.
The commendably informative programme offers the intriguing vision of a structure being imposed upon the disorder, in that Carroll’s pre-adolescent Alice is here an adolescent who does battle with her teenage angst and teeming imagination; and these are personified by the characters she meets on her underground trip. I assume the preference by joint directors Alice Evans and Samantha Knipe for Carroll’s original title of Adventures Underground rather than the later in Wonderland makes reference to their intention.
Things get off to an attractive start with the 14-strong company performing if not a lobster quadrille then something like it as the audience takes its seats, and then there’s a burst of frantic action and blaze of light as the gaily-costumed components of Alice’s troubled psyche come forward and identify themselves – neurosis, depression and so on. The pace is furious, the sound level high and the cramped OFS space peopled by hurrying bodies – the constant movement, exits and entrances creates a helter-skelter effect.
And this rush and noise continues more or less at the same pitch for the remainder of the short 1 hour 15 mins show (there’s no interval). By the hour mark I was longing for an interval or just for a pause so that Alice might engage one-to-one with the larger-than-life beings whom she meets and who have entered our language and consciousness. Instead, an intermittent and to my mind redundant narrative is handed from actor to actor as Alice and the rest mill about on stage and on the upper levels to side and rear, often declaiming at the top of their voices to no good effect.
The psychological take on the story soon loses its force as it’s hard to distinguish between the various characters by costume or voice. I’m happy to blame myself for not identifying the March Hare until almost the end, but the other characters are mostly dull or anonymous, quirky but to no particular purpose. The Mad Hatter's tea party flits by practically unnoticed. The Queen of Hearts has energy and, appropriately, the voice of a town crier, but she’s soon shot her bolt ad dwindles away as her performance is all on one level.
Alice looks fine with her long tresses and band, the pre-teen’s pinafore dress turned here into rebellious leggings and smock-top, but her dialogue amounts to little more than a spot of rhetoric, and the overriding impression is of blandness. I found myself desperately hoping (in vain) for a guest appearance by Tweedledum and Tweedledee; and where on earth was Humpty Dumpty, the greatest of all Carroll’s creations, that master of crazy logic and blown-up bladder of egotism?
Tuesday’s performance took place pretty much in a laughter-free zone, I’m afraid, and there was a feeling that the frantic jollity on stage was passing a largely unmoved audience by. One final thought – this is no Christmas show; it’s not likely to appeal to many children since simple verbal and visual humour are thin on the ground, and judging by the audience opinion I canvassed after the show, it is likely to struggle to make a positive impact on adults as well.