It is the dream of every major arts organisation to have a family-friendly banker of a show that they can mount at regular intervals, boosting both audience spread and the institutional coffers.
Ever since its 2011 premiere, which I was lucky enough to attend, Christopher Wheeldon’s full-length three-act narrative ballet based on the indestructible Lewis Carroll classic has fulfilled this role for the Royal Ballet, thus removing a little of the weight from the shoulders of perennial festive favourite The Nutcracker.
For all Carroll’s ebullient invention, there is a fundamental problem with the book when it comes to stage iterations: it’s a fiercely episodic narrative, which makes a strong through-line a challenge. Theatre has struggled with this – and theatre has words at its disposal, meaning that it can indulge luxuriantly in Carroll’s linguistic pyrotechnics. Ballet, of course, cannot do this, which presents Wheeldon with a considerable challenge and one that the shaping of the story by playwright Nicholas Wright only partially surmounts.
Yet what joy bursts forth right from the prologue in this staging by Christopher Saunders, Elizabeth Toohey and Jillian Vanstone. We are at a Carroll family picnic on an Oxford lawn, where Alice (Francesa Hayward on opening night) is quietly sweet on the gardener’s boy Jack (William Bracewell) and Carroll himself (James Hay) swiftly transmutes into a twitchy White Rabbit.
Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole that opens up in the centre of a large trifle in Bob Crowley’s ingenious design and we’re off, to a mad shape-shifting world where the clocks run backwards and flamingos (long pink headed gloves on dancers’ arms) are used as croquet mallets to whack rolled-hedgehog balls.
It’s worth dwelling on that design for a moment, as Crowley’s vibrant work, which includes video projections and a huge articulated puppet of a Cheshire cat, makes a heartening change from the Royal’s more staid painted backcloths.
Joby Talbot’s varied score bursts with influences from classical to Asian; the former paves the way for tender pas de deux between Hayward and Bracewell, now the on-the-run Knave of Hearts, as well as a charming neoclassical ensemble for a deck of cards.
Hayward, one of the Royal Ballet’s brightest stars, is all lightness and grace as a headband-wearing Alice, with just the right quality of mischievous innocence as a young woman on the brink of adulthood. I particularly cherished the delicate frenzy of pointe work to convey her confused delight at her new surroundings.
That firecracker performer Steven McRae tap-dances up a storm as the roguish Mad Hatter and Lauren Cuthbertson, the original Alice in 2011, is now the ferocious Queen of Hearts in a giant red cylinder of an outfit that needs to be propelled onto the stage by two handlers. Freed from this, she dances with imperious expressiveness and touches of comedy.
Refresh your memory of the book beforehand and settle back to enjoy the country’s leading ballet company at expansive play.
In rep until 1 November (020 7304 4000, rbo.org.uk); cinema livestream on 15 October.
