Lois Chimimba, Hal Fowler and Carly Bawden in wonder.land at the Olivier, National Theatre, London. Picture: Brinkhoff Mögenburg
wonder.land continues at the Olivier, National Theatre, London until 30 April 2016.
Star rating: 3 stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Cyberbullying and identity theft are not the themes that would immediately come to mind when reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or its sequel, Through the Looking Glass. Yet those works do contain hints at a young girl struggling to find her own sense of self in a journey in which she meets fantastical characters that are an amalgam of characters from the real Alice’s life and satirical viewpoints on the society of the day.
And that’s one of the ways in which the National’s colourful, surreal new musical escapade wonder.land captures the anarchic spirit of Carroll’s children’s stories. Rather than just relying on updating the story to a contemporary setting, this collaboration between musician Damon Albarn, writer Moira Buffini and director Rufus Norris deconstructs the story and its characters, reshaping them around a narrative that has its feet firmly planted in the real world, leaving the mythical Wonderland as a form of colourful escapism that begins to seep into the grey world of London.
Lois Chimimba impresses as Alice ‘Aly’ Hatton, a teenager who is struggling to cope with her parents’ divorce, how her new baby brother has come to dominate everything, the move to a new school and the bullying of the local mean girls. Overwhelmed by real life, she constructs an avatar in the online game wonder.land, also called Alice, who is everything she is not – blonde, pretty, confident and with plenty of friends.
Rae Smith’s set designs, all monolithic slabs of slate grey, work to make the online environment – realised by beautifully cheesily rendered 3D projections – an Oz-like principal source of colour. Unfortunately, the drabness isn’t solely confined to the set, as several of Act I’s musical numbers are deliberately, if disappointingly, repetitive. Aly’s frustration with her baby-obsessed mum and her bipolar dad (clearly inspired by the Duchess and the Mad Hatter respectively) is clear enough without needing the ensemble to point it out 30 times or more.
Act I is enlivened by Hal Fowler’s demented MC, but really comes alive whenever Anna Francolini’s head teacher, Ms Manxome, is on stage. More a Cruella De Vil-style queen of heartlessness than a Queen of Hearts, her confiscation of Aly’s phone leads to her takeover of the Alice avatar, and her desire to subjugate everyone lays threat to the wonder.land community.
Francolini’s solo outings head more towards traditional musical theatre than some of the earlier numbers, and are all the better for that. But the real heart of the show is laid bare in a beautiful duet between Chimimba’s Aly and Carly Bawden’s Alice, as the former finds a way to verbalise all the doubts and worries that have been eating her up inside.
Act II is far less uneven and more enjoyable than the slow-moving first. Opening with a projected animation that re-imagines Alice as a Mario Brothers-style platform gamer, growing and shrinking as she eats and drinks magic foodstuffs, there is a greater sense of narrative flow throughout. As Aly joins forces with classmate Luke (Enyi Okoronkwo), the visuals gain influence from his own taste in online gaming, as the action heads towards a denouement which feels earned.
While wonder.land predominates with questions over its characters’ identity, and their quest to discover the answers, a bigger question hangs over the show: the nature of the audience it’s appealing to. The concentration on bullying and teenage identity suggest that it is aiming for a family audience, but the occasional fruitiness of Buffini’s book may preclude younger theatregoers from enjoying it to the full. As it is, this is an intriguing musical mix that, even if it does not quite work, provides some unforgettable visuals.
Scott Matthewman
Tickets for wonder.land are available from: www.musicaltheatrereview.entstix.com/tickets/wonder-land
* wonder.land is co-production with Manchester International Festival, the production will visit the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in June 2016.
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