Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland©

It’s truly a Broadway-style blockbuster, given the wildly imagined costumes and character roles, immersive projections and settings, its circus speed, and Joby Talbot’s cinematic score with melodies and percussive explosions matched to each absurdist chapter down Carroll’s rabbit-hole. 

Wheeldon’s choreography starts modestly enough, in the garden of Alice‘s Victorian home as some rather odd guests arrive for lunch, then  switches down in Wonderland to lots of crazed and thrusting limbs, but by midway this pantomime shifts to some masterful storytelling through inventive choreography.

Magically, the characters Alice meet are dreaming - and seriously nightmare - versions of people back home in her garden, like her mother as the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts (Ako Kondo), Carroll as the White Rabbit (Brett Chynoweth) and the family’s young gardener Jack as the alleged tart-stealing Knave (Jarryd Madden).

Ben Davis in drag embodies the ballet’s underlying horror as a very arch Duchess and the Mad Hatter (George-Murray Nightingale) and his ghoulish Tea Party mates are not for the fainthearted. Alice however is never deterred, her pluck once an inspiration for Victorian female readers – and a reassurance for us in the audience.  Sharni Spencer expressively dances Alice’s wide-eyed curiosity and abandonment and makes a tender teenage double with Madden.  Nibbling on a mushroom, Spencer is deliciously awed, as are we, by the hallucinatory Flowers Waltz. 

Throughout, Bob Crowley’s set and costume designs artfully mix a fond Victorian aesthetic with a surreal language of modernity, underlined by the kinetic projections and whirling animation by Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington, and lit in rich colours by Natasha Katz.  It’s an alluring voyage. 

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud