What is Melly Still on? I wouldn't mind some, myself. Her staging of Simon Reade's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is interesting even when it doesn't really work, and it doesn't really work quite a lot of the time. Yet there are times when this update gets right to the heart of the story. It is like watching an onion being slowly unpeeled: you keep catching a whiff of something surprisingly pungent.
Reade and Still make the family and time central to the story. This young Alice is something of a baby, but by the end of the show she is a mother herself, rooting through the attic discovering her old white rabbit and handing it on to her own daughter. There is a touch of Peter Pan in this final scene, the tragic sense of the way childhood can never be recovered but also that maturity - and one's own children - can offer their own rewards.
Elsewhere, Still's production has much less consistency than her marvellous Beasts and Beauties at the same theatre earlier in the year. It is often more clumsy in the staging, and, curiously for a production of Alice, lacks real humour - you are fascinated by what you see but you don't enjoy it quite as much as a Christmas show should be enjoyed. None the less, there are some great things here, particularly in the way it tricks the eye as Alice gets bigger and smaller and creates its own dream world out of the scribblings of a child on a wall.
The scene with the Duchess and the Pig is exquisitely done, both strange and surreal and yet as familiar as all dysfunctional family life. If you've got a family you will recognise it. Wonderland itself - with Alice's bossy older sister cast as the murderous Queen of Hearts - is a rather Kafkaesque place, with a touch of the cold war Eastern bloc police state in this world of double talk and instant executions. This probably is not to everyone's taste, but I loved its idiosyncratic mindset.
· Until January 22. Box office: 0117-987 7877.
