More than the odd playwright has discovered to their cost that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is harder to adapt than they might suppose. Yes, Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic is rich in novelty, wit and delight. But yes, too, its structure is episodic and its protagonist lacks agency. Stuff just happens to Alice, one thing after another: colourful but not dramatic.
Carroll purists would surely disagree, but in Gallus in Weegieland, Johnny McKnight makes a better fist of it than most. His version might divert from the original with a story about a girl travelling from Glasgow’s bougie West End to working-class Dennistoun, where she falls in love with a boy-rabbit, but it also gives this Alice Pleasance Liddell a motivation and an adversary.
