With more incident than drama, Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic is a tricky one to stage. The logical games that delight on the page can come across as haphazard in performance. Alice, too, can seem overly passive, the ineffectual centre of a chaotic world.
The solution of playwright Andrew Pollard in the Dukes theatre’s annual promenade around Williamson Park is to paint Alice as a modern-day Cinderella. Played with charm and determination by Eve Pereira, she is a girl bullied equally by teacher and classmates as they set out on a school camping trip. The arc of the story is to award Alice the status she deserves.
It kicks off when her only sympathetic friend, Lewis (Ross Telfer), goes AWOL in what is either a forest storm or a raid by a Jabberwocky. Alice’s attempts to rescue him as she enters Wonderland give some sense of structure to the parade of caterpillars, mock turtles and dormice that come her way. There are digressions aplenty, but at least she has purpose.
Escorted from location to location by a nervy White Rabbit (Emma Nixon), we visit the Duchess’s café and the Mad Hatter’s tea party and wind up at the Ashton Memorial, an appropriately extravagant home for the Queen of Hearts (Helen Longworth). The production by Kirstie Davis is broad and jolly, if rarely actually funny, graced by a catchy set of 60s-influenced songs by Steven Markwick. The cast have a good time going through their twisting dance moves.
As is typical for these shows, there is too much waiting around and too much desire to impose indoor theatre techniques on an outdoor space, but with lively performances by a multitasking Katie Ball and Kira Hayes, not to mention the bold colours and black-and-white stripes of Jessica Curtis’s costume designs, it is a suitably breezy summer show.
• At Williamson Park, Lancaster, until 25 August
