Acclaimed performance company Platform 4 is promising to take a Lighthouse audience on a sonic journey through the Wonderland of Alice, weaving together original music, Lewis Carroll’s text and voices from 40 contemporary Alices!
The Alice Project is a gig theatre riff, a homage and a fascinating audio adventure down the rabbit hole, with a four-piece band of multi-instrumentalist performers.
Expect twisting melodies, smiling cats, tearful mock turtles, and percussive teacups. For the curious. And the curiouser.
Here, artistic director Catherine Church explains more...
How did you first conceive this show?
I was having a conversation with one of my oldest friends who happens to live in Lyndhurst. She said that the real Alice who inspired Alice in Wonderland was buried in the church there. She had been doing the school run past the church for years and had only just found out herself!
It got me thinking – why don’t more people know this? Why don’t more local people know this?
We started a process of research, speaking to people who lived in the New Forest, and unearthed many amazing participants – a poison doctor, a mushroom expert, a woodsman, various menopausal Lyndhurst friends, a local historian and people who lived in the grounds of Cuffnells, the big house where Alice lived. What did they think of the real Alice? What were their memories of the book? How could we make this version of the zillions of versions of Alice – unique for them and for us – but still speak for everyone?
How did you choose what local people to work with?
We chose people who had direct links to Lyndhurst and who had obvious knowledge of Alice Liddell and/or the text, or people who had tangential links to the themes we were foregrounding in the music – transformation, change, thoughts about growing up, getting older.
We then started getting more focused about how to depict Alice herself. I am 53 years old, so I could depict Alice to a point, but it seemed a bit ridiculous to embody her! So, with the help of Culture in Common and Angus at the New Forest Heritage Centre which is slap bang in the middle of Lyndhurst, we started recruiting Alices! In the end on 4 May 2023, Wonderland Day, we brought 40 New Forest Alices together for a day of craft, interviews, tea and cake and Alice games!
This can be seen in the feature on us for BBC South Today, but having multiple Alices speaking over and in the music seemed the right way forward — as Alice herself says in the book: “This curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”
It must have been a challenge to adapt such an iconic novel?
We slowly started to adapt the novel which proved a challenge – it took me a long time to work out a structure. I started out very sure I wanted random tracks that jumped around with the narrative and were self-contained and different in style, but in the end I gave in to the power of Carroll’s narrative and roughly followed his order of events. We still jump around madly in style though — marches on four melodicas, prog rock, minimalism, psychedelia.
:: The Alice Project plays Lighthouse on Thursday 3 April. Tickets available now at The Alice Project – Lighthouse or call 01202 280000.