Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Orange Tree Theatre, London

Writer: Chinonyerem Odimba

Director: Matt Hallsall

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a new piece commissioned for the 18-25 Young Company of the Orange Tree Theatre. Writer Chinonyerem Odimba takes inspiration from Lewis Carroll to fashion an energetic twenty-first-century work with an encouraging message and sufficient parts for the whole company. It’s directed with verve by Matt Hassall.

Visually, it’s very striking. Isabella Van Braeckel has designed some wonderfully absurd costumes, in particular, all sorts of imaginative headgear to allow for quick switches of character. To enable Alice both to grow and shrink, there are large and small doorways, with actors wearing headgear with a conspicuous keyhole to denote their status. The Cheshire Cat sports an especially fine pair of neon sunglasses, and the Queen of Hearts and her consort are resplendent in Barbie-adjacent fluffy pinkness.

Only Alice herself and her two alter-egos are dressed simply in jeans and sneakers. For this is a story transposed to modern times. It begins with a school trip to a residential centre. It’s apparent that Alice does not fit in – it’s delicately hinted that she may be neurodiverse. She doesn’t enjoy loud noises or group activities, can’t really get the hang of conventional social interaction, tending to lecture others on her concern with the planet and sustainability. She really wants to go home.

Chasing the white rabbit, she finds herself in Wonderland. Here we meet many of Lewis Carroll’s original characters, including a very fine caterpillar, a flamboyant Mad Hatter with a host of tea-party guests, a pepper-pot-wielding cook and many others.

Carroll famously slipped into his original a critique of Victorian moralism, with his rewriting of various improving hymns and nursery rhymes – famously turning ‘Speak kindly to your little boy’ into ‘Speak roughly to your little boy/And beat him when he sneezes’. Odimba’s retelling has much to admire, but it has to be said she substitutes a strongly didactic twenty-first-century take for the very nineteenth-century equivalent Carroll was determined to avoid.

And so it is that lonely Alice (a strong performance at this performance by Eithne Garricks – LeeAnn Sule alternates) gradually learns that she must surround herself with friends (‘people who make your heart smile’, as one lyric has it) and learn not to be so combative. In an earlier scene, she and her Alice counterparts had seriously thought about the dangers of people-pleasing. But the message in the second act seems to undermine the theme of authenticity that Odimba is keen to spell out.

It’s musical theatre, with lots of well-choreographed movement and dancing and some catchy songs. There’s a rather long interval in which audience members are encouraged by the cast to learn dance moves for the forthcoming tea party. The particular demographic of members and patrons on this occasion meant there were few takers, but doubtless this will work better at the other performances.

Again, it’s the nature of a show written for a particular company that the need to give everyone a part leads to what may feel like things getting overextended. So, for example, the talented Jessica Millson is wonderful as the Mock Turtle, but the inclusion of her number inveighing against plastics in the sea late on feels unnecessary, breaking up the rhythm of the big trial scene.

The cast are a joyful, talented group, exuding energy: they clearly adore taking part. Who the show is aimed at is a different question. Younger children brought along by their parents may well be a bit baffled. But it deserves to be seen by fellow teenagers.

Runs until 22 December 2025