Alice (Sarah Greene) is a nice Cork girl recently bereaved and facing the humiliation of her sister’s forthcoming wedding. While in Dublin on the hens’ night, she gets a little drunk, hooks up with a delivery boy (Ian Lloyd Anderson) in a club, and then goes on a hallucinatory journey through the Dublin streets looking for his home. When she finds him, she must contend with the fact that the young man already has a fiancée (Lisa Byrne), and a powerful, overbearing mother-in-law-in-waiting (Tony Flynn).
This is not an inherently interesting story. In fact, it is downright pedestrian. But as the programme notes and a song lyric by Phillip McMahon performed in the course of this Irish musical state with pointed intent: “The key is in the journey.” THISISPOPBABY aren’t here to tell a story, not really. Alice in Funderland is an energetically hyperstimulated visual and auditory experience occasionally touching base with musical theatre. Though the songs are lyrically expressive, they are not musically memorable in the idiom of the classic musical. (apart from the last, which cheerfully asserts “There is no fear, just nonsense.”) Not all of the performers are strong singers, and though there there are some very skilled movers working under choreographer Liz Roche's direction, it’s not really about the pleasures of song and dance in execution. Rather the songs and dances all become extensions of Alice’s mental ruminations and emotional convolutions, ultimately suggesting to all have been a curious dream. It’s theatre with music. And yes: it’s based on Alice in Wonderland.
So, the issue is the extent to which this variant on a familiar text with a familiar trope will speak to its audience. There’s no question that its high energy performers and its marvellously vivid set and costumes by Naomi Wilkinson crisply lit by Sinéad McKenna, set in motion to a pulsing electro-pop score by Raymond Scannell under Wayne Jordan’s direction makes every effort to hold your attention, and in the first half at least, does so. There are some ideas that gel well and are effective, and as the collaborators (Jennifer Jennings, Wayne Jordan, Phillip McMahon & Raymond Scannell) note in the programme, part of its engagement with the audience has been framed by fact that it was developed throughout the emergence and escalation of the economic crisis when “the country turned upside down.” The show is packed with largely throwaway but not ineffective satiric jabs at the culture of the carcass of the celtic tiger, including framing the Cheshire Cat (Mark O’Regan) as an oily politician/evangelical minister who grins “we all partied” from a video monitor during Alice’s trial (after explaining the difference between a trial and a tribunal is that the former costs less and results in a conviction). It is less overtly satirical thanImprobable Frequency in that regard, though it is more consciously contemporary. No, the journey here is a combination of sincerity and self-parody, and its multiplicity of light gags about life and love (and the various character types experiencing it) seemed to work for the largely young, very tuned-in audience it attracted on the night.
The show does lose pace in its second half, and the pantomime elements (again self-consciously referenced in lines of dialogue: “whatever happened to he’s behind you”, says Alice) become more pronounced with Flynn’s strong and commanding presentation of a rather over-indulged character (the Red Queen). The fact is that after the crazy journey of the first half, with Alice meeting up with versions of all the familiar Lewis Carroll figures refigured as Dublin types, the second is set entirely in Hartstown (Hearts, geddit?) and is much heavier on the aforementioned pedestrian plot. A lot of the energy goes out of it and the action is repetitious. When the show strives for real sincerity and even reflective darkness (the macabre use of the “Scissor Sisters” being one example), the mood is undermined by its first half hijinks where every sincere moment came with a comic relief aside (just in case).
On the whole the show leaves a fairly good aftertaste, but the most enduring images are of Wilkinson’s costumes under McKenna’s lights, pleasingly clean-lined, cartoony, and bright. The melancholic songs won’t linger so much , and that’s why the show is somewhat ineffective beyond its spectacular elements, but there’s no doubt that THISISPOPBABY have given it both barrels here, and that there is merit in them taking the shot.
Harvey O'Brien