Alice in Wonderland, Malvern Theatre Players production at Malvern Theatres (From Malvern Gazette)

Alice in Wonderland, Malvern Theatre Players production at Malvern Theatres

11:15am Tuesday 25th January 2011 in Reviews

ALICE in Wonderland is a strange and unusual tale about the adventures of a young girl in a fantasy world she gets to after falling down a rabbit hole. There have been many very different versions of Lewis Carroll’s story and this production sticks fairly closely to the original.

The book has little in the way of plot so the production was more a collection of loosely connected sketches, each one stranger than the last. In the weird world of Lewis Carroll’s imagination Alice is introduced to a world of contradictions, uncertainties and confusion and possibly some of the oddest characters in children’s literature, from the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat to the Mock Turtle, the dancing lobsters and the rather scary Queen of Hearts with her fondness for executions.

This was a visually impressive production, with wonderful projected and moving backdrops and stunning costumes. A large cast of both adults and children played the characters and Jodie Coates was a likable and outspoken Alice, frustrated by the nonsense she encounters.

In its dream-like strangeness Alice In Wonderland was perhaps less child-friendly than the Malvern Theatre Players’ recent adaptations of Roald Dahl’s much more accessible children’s stories. By Sue Vickers