Critics Round-Up: An ‘imaginatively crafted delight’ or a ‘thin ballet’? Royal Ballet’s Alice

We know that the Royal Ballet’s dan­cers are excep­tional, we’ve seen that the designs and light­ing are magical, but the jury is still out on whether Chris­topher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land sat­is­fies as a the­at­rical piece.

Clem­ent Crisp’s final para­graph from his Fin­an­cial Times review of the cur­rent run was,

But for all the unflag­ging ener­gies, phys­ical and emo­tional, that its cast brings to the cho­reo­graphy, this is a game of “keep it mov­ing and they won’t see the holes”. And the holes – the coarse score, the blus­ter­ing, false drama – are too large to disguise.

Which he’d already spot­ted on its first outing,

I was less than enrap­tured by this blatant affair at its cre­ation last year. In its cur­rent revival cer­tain changes have been made – sig­ni­fic­antly in split­ting an inter­min­able first act into two – but the sum effect is still of blaz­ing mis­con­cep­tions in sup­pos­ing that such a nar­rat­ive can admit of trans­la­tion into move­ment. Carroll’s verbal con­ceits, the Vic­torian social atti­tudes that clothe sur­real fantasy, the cent­ral image of a little girl hav­ing a Senior Wrangler’s assur­ance – all these have no dance iden­tity, and Alice her­self is aged by 10 years to become a pubes­cent heroine.

Judith Flanders for The Arts Desk was think­ing along the same lines,

If you like video tricks, dazzling pro­jec­tions, spe­cial effects and Uncle-Tom-Cobbleigh-and-all, then this Alice in Won­der­land is for you. If, how­ever, you want a dance-drama, well, you’re out of luck.

adding,

A seasoned dram­at­urg would have told him his choice of story had doomed him to this, since Alice in Won­der­land is not, prop­erly speak­ing, a novel at all, with roun­ded char­ac­ters, or any­thing as eccent­ric as a plot. Instead it is a picar­esque, with a single char­ac­ter mov­ing from scene to scene, each designed merely to answer the ques­tion, And then? And then? So poor, perky Lauren Cuth­bertson bourées and arabesques without focus between groups of people who have no interest in her, or in each other, at all.

Damningly she concludes,

Wheel­don does not appear to know how to use dance to tell a story.

So the real prob­lem for the dis­sent­ers is put­ting Carroll’s word­play on a stage which con­tains only music and  movement.

Wheeldon’s Alice wrestles to cre­ate a coher­ent plot from Carroll’s sur­real pro­gres­sion of incidents,

says The Inde­pend­ent’s Zoe Ander­son, and so she too has to conclude,

This Alice is a fine spec­tacle, but a thin ballet.

Then there are the crit­ics on the other side of the fence. As The Tele­graph’s Mark Mon­ahan admits,

It is still, inev­it­ably, at the mercy of its source material’s epis­odic structure.

but says the bal­let is

… a response to Lewis Car­roll’s writ­ing that had just the right crazy glint in its eye. And in this revival, almost exactly one year on, it is look­ing bet­ter yet.

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