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Lewis
in Wonderland Group: Naked Productions |
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James Panton | |
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Lewis in Wonderland is an innovative and stylised play that tells the story of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Caroll), whose obsessions with the young Alice Liddle lead to her immortalisation as the heroine of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We are taken along a narrative which weaves between the Senior Common Room in Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson is a shy and stammering mathematician, to punting trips on the river, where Dodgson comes to life weaving stories for the young Alice, and into the absurdity of those stories themselves. A great many histories and biographies of Dodgson in recent years have sought to lay bare the truth of the relationship between this Oxford academic and his pre-pubescent muse. Unsurprisingly, Dodgson has often been characterised as a paedophile. There is a moment early on in this piece when, just after Dodgson's first intoxicating meeting with Alice, all the players take to the stage and dance childishly to 'Tainted Love'. For a moment it seems we are about to descend into an unsubtle play about Dodgson the paedophile. But the play successfully avoids any clear-cut contemporary preoccupations, and focuses instead on an attempt to understand Dodgson for what he was, a rather naive and socially incompetent individual who sought to retreat from the adult world of rules and responsibility and who found solace in the naivety and innocence of childhood. In Lewis in Wonderland, it is the adult world that is absurd, that provides the raw material for the alienating absurdities of Wonderland itself. It is Mrs Liddle, wife of the Master of Christ Church and mother of Alice, who is the Queen shouting 'Off with their heads!' In this way, Lewis in Wonderland captures Dodgson's failings as they were understood in his own time: it is less that he enjoys the company of children, far more that he would retreat from the world of adulthood. It is less that he would sexually corrupt a young girl, far more that, in breaking down the distinction between child and adult, he is a bad role model for a young girl who must learn the rules of adult life. This is a fascinating and absorbing play that mixes realism and fantasy in an attempt to capture the psychology of an ultimately tragic individual. 31 July to 24
August.
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