With the RSC facing crises on every front, it would be good to report a walloping seasonal hit. But Adrian Mitchell's dramatisation of Lewis Carroll's twin classics, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, is very much a game of two halves. Carroll's first book adapts so well, but his follow-up yields a faint ennui; in Rachel Kavanaugh's production, the Wonderland section has a delightful oddity about it, but once you are through the Looking-Glass you long for Alice to get a move on, become a chess queen, and wake up to reality.
As WH Auden pointed out, Wonderland is a place of total anarchy, whereas its sequel offers "a completely determined world without choice". After the propulsive confusion of the first book, we are into a world where Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion and the Unicorn, the Red and White Knights are forced into conflict, irrespective of their feelings. Intellectuals may relish the Joycean delights of the Jabberwocky and the chess-game symmetries of the Looking-Glass but, in my experience, children always prefer the reckless madness of Wonderland.
Peter McKintosh's central circular aperture allows Katherine Heath's demure Alice to go hurtling through space; sliding doors with changing perspectives permit her to shrink or grow at will. And Disneyfied tweeness is avoided: Robert Horwell's blue-chinned, socially pretentious Duchess has echoes of Mrs Bouquet, and Liza Sadovy's insanely peremptory Queen of Hearts is pure Margaret Thatcher. Terry Davies and Stephen Warbeck's music, with its saxophones and accordions, has pleasing echoes of 1920s Berlin - Beautiful Soup, as sung by Paul Leonard's Mock Turtle, is a particularly lugubrious delight.
But it all goes off the boil after the interval. Carroll's conceit of Alice's chessboard progress is more literary than dramatic, and Mitchell plays by the rules but can't conceal the repetitive nature of a land governed by laws to which Alice is unaccustomed. There are occasional visual delights: a Jabberwocky whose protruding phallic neck reminds us that both books can be seen as a form of pre-pubescent sexual fantasy; Sarah Redmond's shapely Tiger Lily, the stuff of more grown-up dreams.
Daniel Flynn, who doubles as Charles Dodgson and the White Knight, lends the latter the right kind of Don Quixote-like courtesy. But although the show is faithful to Carroll, fidelity can be a mixed blessing. Wonderland's dottiness is infinitely more suited to theatre than the determinism of the Looking-Glass world. Drama, in the end, is about choice.
Until November 24. Box office: 020-7638 8891. At the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon (01789 403403), from November 30.
