Alice in Wonderland – review

Alice in Wonderland – review

You don't, of course, get the whole of Alice in Tim Kane's 90-minute puppet version: no caucus-race, no croquet-mallet flamingos and – perhaps rightly, as the show is aimed at the five-plus generation – no baby-bashing cook. Nevertheless, this is a delightful piece of condensed Carroll, designed and directed by Peter O'Rourke with a good deal of visual inventiveness.

Sepia photos, including some of Alice Liddell, surround the performance space, reminding one of the Victorian origins of Carroll's fable. Yet the puppetry also recognises the hallucinogenic strangeness of the story. Houses caper on bendy legs, cups balance on the cusp of giant flowers, flying fish hover delicately in the air. Best of all is the Cheshire Cat, who, at one point, dissolves into an ambulatory grin. And the troubled, flaxen-haired Alice, like the heroine of some existential drama, seems to be undergoing an identity crisis, enquiring: "If I'm not me, then who am I?"