It was in this theatre 12 years ago that Anthony Neilson presented his landmark staging of The Wonderful World of Dissocia. An evocation of the highs and lows of bipolar disorder, it created a topsy-turvy world of imaginative possibility. Words took on new meanings, illogicality reigned and, somewhere just out of sight, disturbing events were taking place.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was an obvious point of reference for this colourful and eccentric fantasia and now things go full circle as Neilson returns to the Lyceum, directing his own adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s novel.
This time the concern with mental illness is not so acute, but it does linger on. The animated Cheshire Cat, created by the video designer Jamie Macdonald, discusses the nature of madness and makes a sound argument that cats are crazier than dogs. That’s before we’re introduced to Tam Dean Burn’s Hatter, who drinks tea with a neurotic appetite, and David Carlyle’s March Hare, who is as contrary as he is officious.
Neilson’s more pressing theme, however, is a different kind of madness: the apparently insane behaviour of adults when seen from the perspective of a child. For all the surrealism of Carroll’s vision, his characters are only a slight exaggeration of their real-world counterparts – after all, childhood can seem like an exercise in learning a game with arbitrary rules. Take, for example, Gabriel Quigley’s Queen of Hearts. Her short-tempered appetite for capital punishment is terrifying, of course, but no more irrational than many a scolding meted out to a child for some unknown crime.
This is the landscape entered by Alice, played by newcomer Jess Peet. An innocent at large, she is sensible, serious and just a touch inquisitive; a well-behaved child of the Victorian age, wiser than her years and too prim to be a serious rebel, but always questioning the smug logic of her elders.
The wonderland she finds is governed by the same linguistic literalism that held sway in The Wonderful World of Dissocia. Where that play gave us insecurity guards and a lost lost property office, here Alice falls when she falls asleep, encounters a dormouse who builds doors and hears about lessons that lessen by the day. This nonsense has a lot of sense.
It looks rather gorgeous, too, on Francis O’Connor’s set, which is dominated, at first, by an enormous golden sun above a tilted circular playing space – ideal for garden lawns, tea parties and playing-card courtrooms. There are clever theatrical tricks as Alice shrinks, gets wedged inside the White Rabbit’s house and watches white roses being instantly painted red.
For all its playfulness and invention, however, the adaptation struggles to find a dramatic arc. Alice has little control over events and is unchanged by anything that happens. She is a protagonist without agency or need of resolution, barring her eventual desire to return home. Having established a tone of subdued whimsy – emphasised by Nick Powell’s delicate music-box melodies – the production takes us from scene to amusing scene with too little underlying sense of urgency.
• At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 31 December. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
