ANDY HEDGECOCK picks out his cultural highlights of 2025
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A reimagined story for a contemporary London audience
L-R Toyin Ayedun-Alase as Chatter and Nkhanise Phiri as Alice
[Helen Murray]
Star cartoonist MALC MCGOOKIN finds lessons for today in the punch, and the economy of line, of an extraordinary generation of illustrators
LEO BOIX, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Dreamers, It Was Just An Accident, Folktales, and Eternity
JENNY MITCHELL, poetry co-editor for the Morning Star, introduces her priorities, and her first selection
HENRY BELL is sceptical of the notion that ‘progress’ is an ideology that the ruling class uses exclusively to camouflage appropriation
In search of political understanding, MATTHEW HAWKINS welcomes a critique of anti-semitism as codified by the Israeli state
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
Alice in Wonderland
Brixton House, London SW9
ONE OF the great things about Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is that it’s so transferable — it easily works as a reimagined story for a contemporary London audience.
Lead writer and director Jack Bradfield transports us to south London’s Brixton in 2022, and 11-year-old Alice (a very impressive Nkhanise Phiri) doesn’t want to go to her nan’s.
She gets into a huge row with her mum on the Tube, where Alice suddenly jumps onto a train going in the opposite direction as the doors close shut.
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