Wonderland

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell, the inspiration for the titular Alice, has been a source of endless literary gossip. Wonderland reveals his dalliance with "another Alice": the actress Isa Bowman, who played Alice on stage. It will do little to silence the rumours.

This should not be a musical: the songs could only be enjoyed by children. However, the story of an old man coercing a young girl into quasi-sexual role-playing is deeply disturbing. The production is hamstrung by its desire to make Carroll, a hero of writer Gyles Brandreth, endearing despite it all.

Indeed, Michael Maloney’s portrayal of Carroll, with his forced ebullience and grating word games, is heavily reminiscent of Brandreth. Maloney and Flora Spencer-Longhurt could clearly do much more with the situation, if only the script would let it be as creepy as it evidently is. Similarly the staging, which includes puppets and magic tricks, is tinged with a desperate zaniness. Shoehorning in the Alice stories, seemingly as evidence for the defence, results in wildly uneven pacing.

The result is a hybrid as strange as the mock-turtle: a children’s story about a paedophile. In trying to both expose a new side to Carroll and preserve his reputation, the play puts in an awful lot of effort, just to get nowhere at all.