Television - Andrew Billen can't find the satire he'd wish for in a new adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic
With seven-year-olds having sleepless nights before SAT tests, there could hardly be a better time for an adapter to present Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as satires on over-formal educational practices.
In Wonderland, Alice fears for her mind as she attempts to recite Southey's "Old Man's Comforts" and ends up with gibberish that is superior to it. Bullied by those educational epicures, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, she complains: "How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons. I might as well be at school." The bizarre literary subversions she comes out with are rebellions against the killing spirit of Victorian rote learning.
Channel 4's Easter Day Alice in Wonderland, however, chose to see Lewis Carroll's masterpieces as fables of artistic self-expression, and turned each animal's lesson into a variety act. It opened not on the river bank but in Alice's bedroom, with Liddell Jr suffering a panic attack about singing before an adult garden party. Running away to the meadows, she fell into a Kubla Khan-style dream that released her romantic imagination.
Alice's performance anxiety must have appealed to the dramatist Peter Barnes, for what adapter attempting to translate a devoutly loved classic would not be beset by doubts? He and the director Nick Willing also had to battle the legacy of previous adaptations, each loved by those who saw them at regrettably impressionable ages. I have a soft spot for the energy of the vulgarly transgressive 1951 Disney cartoon. Intellectuals circa 1966 swear by Jonathan Miller's psychoanalytic BBC interpretation, complete with Ravi Shankar's sitar and Peter Cook's solemnly mad Hatter. The editor of these pages favours a 1972 movie with Michael Crawford, not kindly remembered in the film books. Overall, I found the C4 film, which was made by the American card company Hallmark at Shepperton, a little heavy on raucousness and light on charm, but I am sure that Charlie, the four-year-old who watched it with me, will learn to defend it to the death.
His favourite scene was the joust between the white and red knights from Looking Glass. It worked for me, too, in terms of the schema, as a good example of ritual subordinating natural inventiveness: the White Knight might have got round to cooking his blotting paper pudding were he not always rehearsing Agincourt. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, doomed every day to battle over a rattle, also fitted the plan. The trial of the Knave of Hearts was the grand finale to all these performances, with Simon Russell Beale, as a king playing the role of a judge, putting the show into show trial.
But other scenes did not fit the scheme so securely. Ken Dodd's Mr Mouse delivered a lecture, not a song. The caterpillar - a wonderfully colonial Ben Kingsley - was a lounge lizard, not a performer, and having his body light up like Blackpool just confused matters. Worst of all, the conceit ruined the Mad Hatter's tea party by making the time- wasting Hatter, played definitively by Martin Short, launch into a full music-hall number about his grandmother's leg.
Visually, this Alice, abetted by the Jim Henson puppet workshop, was intermittently inspired - and not merely by John Tenniel's illustrations. I loved the opening sequence's whooshing descent down through the floorboards of the deanery to the garden. Accompanying the Hatter's song, the dormouse played on an organ sunk into a multi-sprouted kettle. The Mock Turtle lived in a terrine of his own soup. Yet other times the designers' wit had difficulty making itself seen through the golden, Andrex commercial, lighting.
Given the extraordinary cast, the performances were disappointingly uneven. Peter Ustinov and Pete Postlethwaite were superb as Walrus and Carpenter, as was Gene Wilder as the Turtle (Donald Sinden, as the voice of the animatronic Gyphon, corrected his hard vowels). But Sheila Hancock just shrieked as the Cook, as did Miranda Richardson, who was not half as effective a Queen in Wonderland as she was in the Blackadder court.
In the final scene beneath ground, she presented her trial evidence as attestation of artistic authenticity. "I do not care what people think when I am right," she announced, a little too much like the Red Queen herself. Back in the real world, she tore up "Cherry Ripe", the sentimental Victoriana she was supposed to sing, and delivered the "Lobster Quadrille" to adult acclaim rather than their censure.
As Charlie's mum asked, will we have to wait for another Victorian age before getting a story that counsels children about the dangers of being strong-willed and original? How about a picture book advertising adult wisdom and the joys of conformism? Carroll, after all, predicted that Alice would grow up with the "simple and loving heart of her childhood" - not the raging ego of a performance artist.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
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