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.

All alone, so begins Alice’s bizarre journey to the unknown, trapped on the Tube and surrounded by weird and wacky characters stuck on a train driven by the power-crazy Queen, who is leading them to nowhere.

All the old favourites are there; Dee and Dum, Chatter (not Hatter), Rabbit and Cat to name a few — with the small cast playing a number of roles.

But it’s perhaps the prowling Jabberwocky who particularly stands out. Despite Debbie Duru’s unfussy costume design, it enters in a plume of smoke with red torches for eyes — it’s incredibly effective and pretty terrifying.

The production is full of clever puns and funny in-gags — a chunk of the script relies on a healthy knowledge of London’s Underground map: “Time is precious and you’re draining it like a Waterloo,” “Look how far the Stockwell market’s crashed” — and Alice’s rapping, music and dance add extra pizazz to this lively production.

A lot of credit goes to set designer Shankho Chaudhuri, who has presented us with a simple but cleverly designed Tube carriage, capturing the claustrophobic atmosphere perfectly.

All in all, Bradfield and the team have done a great job reinterpreting this classic story with pace and energy, its moral being — if we all work together, we can get ourselves out of any sticky situation.

It even managed to impress my eight-year-old son, who stated it “was such a good idea to set it on the Tube — 10 out of 10!”

Praise doesn’t come much higher than that.

Alice In Wonderland plays at Brixton House until December 31 2022. Box office: (020) 7582-7680, brixtonhouse.co.uk.