In adapter-director Peter Hinton’s take on Alice in Wonderland at the Shaw Festival, Tara Rosling’s Alice brings an intriguing ambiguity of person to the table, with child and adult both decidedly present. Alice the intended child is unstoppable, a self-propelled energy incarnate in a 10 year old girl. She is delightfully animated in voice and body, with speaking that has the momentum of imagination. A child’s sense of discovery prevails in her, also a high-strung enthusiasm and a childlike sense of self-importance but without self-indulgence.
There’s a strong unbending presence in Alice that bursts girlish in her girlish bobbing about. But there’s also an assertive bite in her delivery, one that echoes adult experience. If her energetic moves take us playfully into a playful realm of odd beings, all without condescension to anyone younger who watches, Alice does so with firmness of purpose that shows adult confidence. When she declares, “grown-ups are ridiculous,” we hear both the child and the grown up Alice speaking of those elder to her and of those like herself. We, in a world of Trump and Brexit and Harper, welcome such thoughts. We too do not know how to handle our very crazy world.
In a society of vindictive Victorian propriety, life as it is denies the realities of the imagination, some of which this production allows us to experience in physical form. Identity is of necessity thus fluid, freedom is realized in a context of oppression, and one eagerly follows the inner logic of this unpredictable place wherever it goes. And in the boat we hear the exchanges of Charles Dodgson-Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell that reveal how imagination is spoken and written down in this limiting world, darkly lit on this stage, that craves another.
These exchanges of Alice and Dodgson show them as deeply connected, perhaps where imagination and human need and a male-female bond overlap and become conspiratorial in a constraining world. We hear this exchange: “I don’t feel I am anywhere” “Nor do I” No wonder the many characters are made as free as the mind to go their own route and not the way of social habit and its stubborn need to suppress anything but itself. Before coming, I had played two recordings of Alice in Wonderland, those of Michael York and of John Gielgud, and each time I was taken over, enriched by Carroll’s imagination, wit, and language. Here too I felt enriched –and awed- albeit with Carroll taken off the page and plunked interpreted on the stage in dazzling theatrical terms.
The players are many in this production of Alice in Wonderland and the Charles Dodgson we meet here implies a reaching beyond himself to some kind of fulfilling connection or state of being. Indeed, we meet the variety implicit in “being” once it is freer of the world. The French Mouse of Neil Barclay is self-assertively very French, the Caterpillar made of several pliable humans is imaginatively choreographed into delightful contortions, and The Duchess played by Donna Belleville is assertive with her authority and presence. A Bo-Peepish sextet prints an alphabet they can’t see as they write on slates. These are all real because they are imagined.
Graeme Somerville’s Mad Hatter comes across as blunt and seemingly punch drunk, Jennifer Phipps’ Cheshire Cat implies worldliness through her challenging air of mischief and as she changes one’s sense of reality on a whim. Moya O’Connell’s Queen of Hearts is gushy and growling, with a delightful self-parodying quality, and she struts in a procession that is plush, lush and colourful. And what Gryphon do you know who is made like Kyle Blair’s and can walk on legs like that?
The Shaw Festival’s Alice in Wonderland is many things at one time. It is theatrically spectacular, emotionally consuming, challenging to one’s imagination, unsettling and delightful. William Schmuck’s costumes are eye-commanding and delicious with variety, while Kevin Lamotte’s lighting, sometimes low and shadow-rich, creates a compelling psychological context from which imagination can escape. In the projections by Beth Kates and Ben Chaisson, enormous projected monarch butterflies do heavyweight flutter, a huge projected face of Alice comes at us bigger and bigger and bigger until it is an overwhelming eye, cards and tea cups blow about in in wind stormy chaos, and Alice is submerged under water. All this brilliantly done technical stuff that takes us in completely.
In the stage setting sensitive music of Allen Cole, a chamber group creates a persistent feeling of immediacy, and it is wistful, gloomy and hopeful. The songs are atmospheric and feel inherent in the narrative and not imposed. With sound by John Lott, voices get pinched into Carroll’s progression into more lunacy. One doesn’t sense constraining physical limits here as things expand and contract in Eo Sharpe’s very busy setting where things become energies of transformation. We constantly check out all the nooks and colours in Sharpe’s setting, all in a spirit of going with the tide, and there is always more here than the eye can categorize at one shot.
In Lewis Carroll’s book adapted for the stage by director Peter Hinton, spoken word is also naturally forefront and, although not always decipherable, familiar lines throughout give us fresh pleasure, especially when they are pun-infected. This is not Carroll’s tale as such, where spoken words feed the listener’s imagination, but a theatrical adaptation with license for the director to follow his own imagination as it is inspired to do so by Carroll. In this happily overwhelming production, an energetic cast each creates a private world for us to enter. Things change shape and size at will and through the perspective of Alice we do too. We are made the same size as Alice, as projected plants and butterflies overwhelm us, and we thus live her experience. Cards are leaves are cards in this place.
Hinton’s take on Carroll may not be totally reflective of the author’s text, but it does offer a vigorously realized surprise at every turn. We have before us spectacular settings in constant flux and these gear our states of mind into high drive. The narration for us is what we make of all these experiences fed to our senses and our minds. And when I asked a group of young people in the lobby if they enjoyed the show, they beamed with smiles that, it seemed, denoted blown away minds.
Yes, I’ll return to Carroll’s spoken text again and allow my imagination to do its own Peter Hinton gig with the author’s tale. But I’m also returning to see this Alice and note if I once again smile, thoroughly delighted, throughout. And since there is still little vegan food in Niagara on the Lake on which to dine beforehand, perhaps I’ll find a vendor of mushrooms, on the tourist-crowded streets, to help prepare me for another go at this splendidly theatrical show. Maybe I’ll invite Grace Slick.