Carroll’s rabbit hole abundantly reimagined

Alice in Wonderland

New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme ★★★★☆

Forget rabbit holes and mirrors, this Alice finds her Wonderland via the stage door. Following a magician into the wings, she trips on a trap door and the rest is pure theatre. In a rich and hallucinatory production first seen in 2011, the director Theresa Heskins matches Lewis Carroll with a theatrical inventiveness of her own.

As well as offering a colourful compendium of Carroll’s characters, the show is a demonstration of the transformative possibilities of the stage. It is in the way Alice knocks back the bottle labelled “drink me” and grows enormous, her dress tumbling in layers to the ground. It is in the way she shrinks, her place taken by stand-ins and puppets.

Most overtly, it is in the tricks of the Great Blanco (Peter Watts) who can magic squares of a chess board into the air or make Alice disappear. It is also in the creatures who stalk the stage, from an enormous Cheshire Cat with glowing eyes to a fire-breathing Jabberwock snapping its metal jaws and making the children scream (great work from puppetry director Paschale Straiton). The sheer abundance of ideas is one way Heskins sidesteps the problem of dramatising such episodic tales. The other is to underline Alice’s struggle to return home. Katie Cannon (covering for Eleanor Fransch) is excellent as a no-nonsense Alice, the illiterate daughter of a Stoke-on-Trent barge family, both irritated and beguiled by the eccentric characters. Her outrage at “the stupidest tea party I have ever been to” is deeply felt.

Until 28 January