What a thing of beauty is Peter Hinton's new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
Hinton and his triumphant design team have fashioned a double-vision world that blurs and bleeds between the reality of Oxford in 1862 and the fantasy land that young Alice (Tara Rosling) discovers down a rabbit hole.
Eo Sharpe has made the floor of the Shaw Festival's main stage into a mesmerizingly shiny surface that morphs from a pond (that boats seem to glide through) to a looking glass (that a young girl might look, or perhaps fall, into).
Beth Kates and Ben Chaisson's projections shoulder much of the heavy lifting for the special effects in Wonderland using video and animation – and, in the case of a truly creepy Cheshire Cat (played by Jennifer Phipps), combining both in the manner of Têtes à claques.
William Schmuck's costumes are elegantly fanciful, his playing cards particularly sumptuous – with Moya O'Connell's chic Queen of Hearts constantly in conversation with the second head below her waist.
And choreographer Denise Clarke's movement work helps coalesce the people with their strange, but restrained surroundings, most delightfully in the appearance of the Caterpillar, formed out of five actors lying in each other's laps and grasping at the air in green gloves.
Unfortunately, as gorgeous as Hinton's Alice in Wonderland is to look at, I can't think of an evening at the theatre I've been to lately that bored me more thoroughly.
Hinton's goal was to please both adults and children with this Alice – and I fear he's particularly missed the mark with the latter. A melancholy take on the material, his show's dominant emotion is not wonder, but anxiety over the adult world and its corruptions and compromises. I found it about half as funny as Uncle Vanya, and twice as depressing.
For all the modern technology used to tell the story, Hinton's revels in the museum aspect of Lewis Carroll's book, the wordplay based around the objects and activities of the highly privileged English society of long ago.
If your children are conversant with the world of treacle, mock turtle soup, blacking and quadrilles, then perhaps they'll enjoy the jokes based on knowledge of them. But even for adults, Hinton's aged Anglophilia is barely penetrable.
I'm sure there is a certain audience member, well versed in David Day's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded, that will be mad as a hatter for this spectacle. But instead of bridging Lewis Carroll's time with ours and highlighting the enduring aspects of his children's tale, Hinton has presented us with the past as if preserved in a museum case – with no accompanying explanatory panels.
On July 4, 1862, Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson and college don Robinson Duckworth took the three daughters of the dean of Christ Church on a boating excursion. Dodgson improvised a story of a girl named Alice who followed a tardy white rabbit on an adventure – and afterwards, Alice Liddell, the middle child, implored him to write it all down. Three years later, Dodgson published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
Hinton's production is framed as the original "performance" of Alice by Dodgson in the boat, giving us this backstory in quick visual strokes that will be confusing to anyone not familiar with it. While Dodgson, Duckworth and the girls embark on their voyage, the rest of the 22-member cast stands on a riverbank waving them off. Open the program and you will find out that each actor in this tableau represents a real person – a Miss Rose LaTouche, a Professor Percival Leigh, a Miss Denison Maurice. If these names hold no meaning for you, you'll just have to Google them later on – and try to decode what their doubling in this Wonderland might mean.
To lay my playing cards on the table, the only stage adaptation of Alice I've ever really enjoyed was the wordless ballet choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon for National Ballet of Canada. For me, Carroll's writing – his riddles, puzzles, acrostics – is anti-theatrical. It's fun to pore over, sentence by sentence, to read aloud and repeat. But as dialogue passing in a single listen, it seems more like gibberish than pleasurable nonsense.
Turned into lyrics for composer Allen Cole's songs here – seemingly inspired by such lively sources as Anglican hymns and Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs – Carroll's language (and mock-Carrollian language) is even more devilishly hard to wrap your head around.
In the absence of meaning, Hinton's downbeat production turns into a tiresome parade of Rosling's delicately acted, irritatingly precocious Alice arguing with colourful creatures that come and go, very few leaving an impression beyond Phipps's haunting Cheshire Cat.
Hinton has tried to turn this into a coming-of-age story – but Alice's transformation from girl to young woman doesn't resonate, while Dodgson's decidedly midlife depression does. The mood-setting song that opens the show and returns for frequent refrains takes its lyrics from a poem by Christina Rossetti. "All things that pass / are woman's looking-glass / They show her how her bloom must fade / and she herself be laid / with wither'd roses in the shade."
In Hinton's faithful, nay, fanatic adaptation, Alice has no clear quest – and there's never a sense of danger as it's all been made clear she's just sitting in a boat listening and imagining.
Indeed, at the very end of the show, Alice wakes up. She's fallen asleep listening to the don's story. I couldn't blame her.
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