Alice at the Asylum – Asylum Chapel, London

Writer: Lydia Vie

Director: Anastasia Revi

Music: Hades

There’s a slight frisson of apprehension that comes with a concept like Theatre Lab Company’s Alice at the Asylum. A contemporary retelling of the Alice in Wonderland story set in a decaying Victorian asylum runs the risk of equating the kind of fun ‘madness’ of the mad hatter and his associates with the mental illness and destitution of people with real struggles. As it turns out, this production isn’t worried about avoiding such ethically muddy waters. With a constantly wide-eyed, manically smiling cast portraying the usual wonderland suspects as a wacky, glamorous party crew, they’re chomping at their bits to say in unison the unavoidable cringe line: ‘We’re all mad here’. 

This rehash of Lewis Carroll’s story is set against the backdrop of voracious capitalism with a property investor, William Rose (Manolis Emmanouel), seeking to develop an apparently disused asylum he has just bought. The setting for the performance is perfect: Peckham’s Asylum Chapel is an atmospheric, decaying Victorian space with a palpable sense of history. When Rose visits the asylum he intends to demolish, he meets Alice, the intransigent final inmate of the asylum, (played by the writer of the piece, Lydia Vie) who leads him down a rabbit hole of burlesque Wonderland silliness in an attempt to scare him off. 

Many of the riddles and surreal proclamations of Carroll’s original are invoked in the teasing of the increasingly impatient businessman, and the fact that it’s all being used to try and get someone to go away underlines how annoying a lot of it is. It feels like you’re trapped with the group at a party who have taken mushrooms, while you’re still painfully sober. It’s useful to remember that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a children’s story. In that context, the riddles are mind-expanding introductions to ideas of maths, logic and rhetorical nonsense, but when we’re all adults, they can be rather trying. Theatrically the production has most in common with the kind of costume-centric walkabout performances you might stumble upon at two in the morning at a festival like Boomtown. 

Whereas sensible yet inattentive Alice in the original is a sympathetic victim of various infuriating japery, we’re not supposed to be on the side of William Rose, the symbol of gentrification. However, this play, with its £35 ticket price, is squarely consumed by the ageing middle class, the willing beneficiaries of gentrification. Therefore we’re all complicit here. And the supposed villain of the piece becomes relatable antihero. 

The play is trying to have a social conscience but that’s difficult when it represents experience-over-content novelty theatre for people keen to fill their culture quotient without taking any risks. It offers nothing challenging or thought-provoking except its own lack of self-awareness. It’s the kind of reinterpretation that may have seemed edgy and fun in the nineties, which incidentally is where it seems Hades, the guitarist who provides the soundtrack, still resides. He stands on the stage throughout, posing with a showy white electric guitar on which he punctuates the tension with Metallica-like minor chord arpeggios. 

This is a very unvital production, a showcase for some creative costume design and an impressive venue, but what it says about identity is probably not what it thinks it’s saying.

Reviewed on 3 December 2023