As I mentioned on facebook, the 1983 anime TV series is somewhat of an oddity.
One of its main oddities is that it doesn't adapt chapters from the books in order.
If, like me, you're a purist and want to watch all episodes in their book order, consider this playlist as an alternate path through.
(Image from pinterest)
No doubt this will take me years and years on end and it might not even get anywhere but...
I have finally begun work on a extremely early draft script for a back to back version of all of both Carroll books. To do justice to Carroll's works, the adaptation will be 2 plays (for each book)
It will be set in 1998 in Devon and will be partially themed around loss.
In my version Alice is about 9 or 10 and is attempting to cope with the death of her Oxford dwelling grandmother who has gifted her Carroll's Alice books. She slips into fantasy whilst the rest of her family grieve.
I would describe it as Laura Wade's version meets Adrian Mitchell's version.
I am also slightly drawing on my own childhood living in Devon, UK. Which for those of you who aren't familiar, is a small region which is mainly rural, made up of countryside, seaside towns and the occasional city.
I had the idea to do this when I was talking with a friend about how to best adapt Carroll and she advised me to "write what I know". I know about quiet, sleepy seaside towns where nothing happens because I grew up in one.
It also didn't feel right setting it now... because I'd have to deal with the internet's omnipresent presence!
Thanks for reading,
Chloe :)
Alice joined the procession, wondering very much what would happen next.
`It’s—it’s a very fine day!’ said a timid voice at her side. She was walking by the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face.
`Very,’ said Alice
Art for Carroll's Alice's adventures in Wonderland by Gertrude Kay
Like Alice in Wonderland by David Lynch - Quote from Telegraph Critic Mark Brown
Content warnings for: Mental health portrayal, also one NSFW scene involving a talking goat. No really.
Premiered: Edinburgh festival, 2006
Good god, I adored this script.
For an Alice-type tale aimed at an adult audience this is one of the best I’ve read.
Poor Lisa Jones. She’s been tasked with finding a “lost hour” of her life in Dissocia, a place that makes Carroll’s dreamworlds of Wonderland and Looking-Glass World look mildly hospitable. Soon after meeting a bizarre watchmaker with unusual drinking preferences, and after hurtling down a lift shaft, Lisa tries to contend with insecure security guards, a man who has literally lost his inhibitions, the worlds most horrifying scapegoat and a friendly polar bear- who sings about death. But there’s also the Black Dog, a ruthless monarch who terrorizes Dissocia’s residents, plunging the land into war.
Neilson, a Carrollian by name - he’s actually adapted Carroll’s Alice in 2017, no less- plays around with Carrollian ideas so much it makes your head spin.
On one level, thirty-something Lisa is a hybrid of lost protagonists found in surrealist works and Carroll’s Alice. Except that Lisa is not seven and a half and not innocent. Her Alice-like wonderment masks a darker insincerity- she’s actually suffering a ton of problems at home and has a strained relationship with boyfriend Vince. This being Neilson, there may be a real chance that Lisa may never make it back home.
And then act 2 pulls the rug from underneath your feet. I’m not going to spoil it, but any hints that Lisa’s misadventures are actually the result of something much darker are very very true.
The journey she undertakes too, is fraught with darkness at the edges. If Carroll’s Alice books have vaguely uneasy characters (The Duchess, The Queen of Hearts, the pig baby, the train passangers, the mutton) and a slightly off kilter atmosphere, then Neilson takes this idea and runs with it. In Dissocia, no one is what they seem and even the nicest of people and creatures that Lisa encounters seem to be hiding something implicitly.
One gets the sense of Neilson setting up Carroll-esque plot tropes, only to take them in newer, creepier directions. The scene with the Goat is flat out horrible, as is Lisa’s attempts to deny the situation by singing, ending in her curling up into a ball and crying in horror.
If anything, Neilson’s Dissocia shows us that for characters, falling down a rabbit hole or going through a looking glass in childhood may be wonderous and slightly unnerving, doing this in adulthood may be their undoing. That rabbit hole may end up leading to a far darker place than you expect.
Brrr...
I’ve never been quite sure on this film, to be honest. I know that a lot of people love it and some people can’t stand it. But I’m sort of in the middle on this one. There’s some really good parts and some not so good parts.
Part 1 adapts Alice in Wonderland and part 2 adapts through the Looking-Glass. The screenwriter also adds a subplot about Alice wanting to be older and to grow up, and introduces the idea of her adventures teaching her a lesson. Although this might sound awful it is actually well executed for the most part and blends in well with the stories. Carroll’s dialogue is often watered down a bit, but this is a hollywood-ized version of the Alice stories if you will, so its sort of expected and not too annoying.
However the songs are quite a different thing, like the performances of the actors, the songs are either really good, OK or terrible. Unfortunately the worst song “I hate Dogs and Cats” sung by the mouse, is the first one we hear. The songs do get better and are really good in the Looking-Glass adaptation.
In terms of actors, Natalie Gregory’s Alice takes a long time to get used to as she is not Carroll’s Alice but by the time we get to part 2 we’ve warmed to her more. The acting again ranges from the good (Sammy Davis Jr as the caterpillar, complete with tap dancing “You are old Father William” sequence, surely one of the highlights of the Wonderland adaptation, also Ann Gilllian as the Red Queen is great, one of the best parts of the Looking Glass adaptation) and the not so good (Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle)
I like the fact that this film attempts to adapt both books back to back and fully. We actually get a fully fledged adaptation of Through the Looking-Glass here, which is really nice to see. On the flipside Carroll’s dialogue is often thrown out of the window in some scenes.
For example when Alice talks to the gnat in the Looking-Glass act, he simply warns her not to go into the wood. I would have liked to have seen the conversation that’s in the novel about the looking-glass insects. But what is in here is very good, we get the Walrus and the Carpenter as well as You are old father william and The Lion and the Unicorn. Most of Carroll’s poems are here, if not all.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about this adaptation and despite its flaws, I really admire its overall ambition to dramatize more of Carroll’s stories.
NOTE: as much as I’d like it to be, this is NOT an analysis of the original Baum books “Land of Oz” or “Ozma of Oz”. It just focuses on this film.
ARCHIVE NOTE: This review was originally dedicated to the blog Phantomwise.
REVIEW CONTAINS HEAVY SPOILERS!
Return to Oz in relation to the down the rabbit hole trope.
Unlike other films I’ve covered for this project, Return to Oz is unique in the aspect that the protagonist has already been “down the rabbit hole” once, and has unwittingly stumbled back down once again, that doesn’t mean that Dorothy knows and understands every character or place in Oz, not at all, because the place has changed…. Dramatically.
In a way, this is comparable with Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Although Alice doesn’t return to anywhere, Looking-Glass World is often suggested by academics to have inverse, interloper characters from Wonderland, Hatter is now Hatta, the March Hare is now Heigha, and in true Alice-style, Alice doesn’t recognise them from her prior dream.
`He's only just out of prison, and he hadn't finished his tea when he was sent in,' Haigha whispered to Alice.
But as an author, Carroll never makes the characters Hatter and March Hare in the text, and most of these theories are founded on Tenniel’s illustration of the characters.
Dorothy does, in contrast, find her companions from her last adventure, but they are also altered, turned to stone by the Nome King’s corruptible force. At the end of the film, once freed, they seem distant from Dorothy. The main characters from the last book are for the most part side-lined for a group of equally unusual friends.
In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice encounters possible versions or variants on the Hatter and March Hare only once. There is no attempt by Carroll to link the two settings. The place behind the looking-glass has its own identifiable name, after all...
"To the Looking-Glass world"
Likewise, this film mostly avoids characters who appeared in the first book.
Carrollian motifs
The film also is preoccupied with Carrollian motifs. Through minor motifs such as Dorothy’s pinafore dress, worn at the beginning of the film, and the small golden key she finds in the real world which later helps her unlock doors in Oz, to bigger, more substantial symbols.
After Dorothy successfully wins her friends back from the Nome King, the castle she is in breaks to pieces, leaving her falling down a colourful abyss.
I point out a comparison with Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in Wonderland:
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Dorothy also enters halls of mirrors whilst in the palace of Princess Mombi, and sets Ozma, rightful heir to the Oz throne, free via pulling her out of a mirror. At the end of the film, it is shown that anytime Dorothy traces the word “Oz” in a mirror, Ozma is there looking at her, implying she can come back anytime she wishes. And the way back? Probably through a mirror.
In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice enters looking-Glass World by passing through her drawing-room mirror.
Beloved Pets and other lands
Billina the chicken shares a similar function to Dinah, both are beloved pets and reminders of the protagonist’s real world existence, but interestingly Berllina gains sentience when Dorothy enters Oz, and helps her on her journey, ultimately destroying the Nome King via an egg.
In contrast, Alice’s beloved cat Dinah is talked of in Alice’s adventures in Wonderland but never seen. Alice pretends her cats Kitty and Snowdrop have sentience in through the looking-Glass but they never follow her to the other side of the mirror at all.
“I was very nearly opening the window, and putting you out into the snow! And you’d have deserved it, you little mischievous darling! What have you got to say for yourself? Now don’t interrupt me!’ she went on, holding up one finger.
Defiance against ruthless monarchs
Princess Mombi’s obsession with heads is taking Carroll’s Queen of Hearts to the next level, unlike Carroll’s Queen, Mombi’s obsession with beheading and keeping different heads certainly isn’t just
all her fancy
The scene when Dorothy meets her is also echoing the scene in the garden in Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Dorothy and Alice both use politeness strategies as a way of dealing with the royalty’s savagery, and when that doesn’t work they resort to speaking their minds.
`Nonsense!’ said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.
Both protagonists even curtsy upon meeting their retrospective monarchs, which as both stories are respectively set in the Victorian and late Edwardian period, would be the expectation for a young girl encountering royalty.
Both of these scenes end with the threat of execution and the protagonists forced to fight back, Alice turning away defiantly and calling the Queen’s ideas nonsense, Dorothy running and using her chicken Billina as a shield against Mombi.
Creation Theatre in Oxford have just announced that excerpts from their Alice adaptation (a mash up of bits from both books, last performed in 2018) will play the Manor, Weston on the Green in Oxford for Easter.
Take your seats for The Manor’s sumptuous Afternoon Tea (tested and approved by the Creation team) and you’ll be joined by Alice, The Dormouse, The Hatter and maybe even the White Rabbit if he’s not running late!
More info here.
please note: cast is as yet unconfirmed, and this is NOT the full show!
(Image from tintinghistory, tint of a self portrait by Charles Dodgson)
Franziska Kholt recently linked me to a fantastic essay she did about the faux biographical play "Peter and Alice"
The essay, entitled "The Dangers of Biopic Realism" is an excellent piece on why some playwrights tend to ignore the new research and seek sensationalism when writing about Carroll's life.
It is by no means an easy read but it is an essential one for anyone interested in how fiction about Dodgson sometimes perpetuates the myths surrounding the man.
Undoubtedly some of you might be a bit perplexed by the lack of recent theatre events I've covered on this blog...
This is because I normally cover World Premieres, and this year appears to currently not have... any.
I particularly cover theatre events in the UK, where this year the main summer productions are currently all pantomimes.
I believe that it is recent political events that are driving away new productions/World Premieres from the UK.
Coupled with the fact that what should have been this year's main event in the UK, Unsuk Chin's Alice through the Looking-Glass Opera, has been cancelled, things don't look great.
The main thing this year worldwide seems to be Oregon Shakespeare Festival's revival of the Eva La Gaillenne script, and whilst it is lovely to see another professional production of La Gaillenne, it isn't exactly new.
Same with Wheeldon's ballet which is in Australia and Germany this year.
