Alice in Wonderland at the Barbican reviewed: too much miaowing

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson loved little girls. He loved to tell them stories, he loved to feed them jam, he loved to set them puzzles, and he loved to take their photographs. On 25 March, 1863, he composed a list of 107 prepubescent portrait subjects, arranged alphabetically by forename. Below the Agneses came the Alices, including Alice Liddell, the little girl for whom he created Alice in Wonderland. Mostly good-mannered, occasionally lachrymose and stuffed full of half-remembered governess-led learning, the fictional Alice displays behaviour quite out of step with her age. Instead of doing what she is told to do by the creatures she meets, she behaves like an adolescent (though adolescence was to Dodgson a destructive force) and learns to disobey.

Unsuk Chin’s 2007 opera Alice in Wonderland is not family-friendly. Her Wonderland is a world of sudden and frightening body changes, unreliable information and irrational violence, the worst offenders being the booming, shrieking, baby-beating, head-chopping adult females whose number Alice must eventually join. In Netia Jones’s staging, cleverly extrapolated from Ralph Steadman’s illustrations, a giant eye, perhaps that of Dodgson, blinks from an aperture on the video screen as the orchestra breathes into the first susurration of gongs and Alice (Rachele Gilmore) succumbs to sleep. Her voice is high, pure and clear, her music a frantic calligraphic scrabble of cross-hatched strings, as though describing the scratch and swirl of a nib on paper, the sharp jab of a full stop. ‘Who in the world am I?’ she asks, over a spritz of xylophone. ‘Ah, that’s the great puzzle!’

Chin uses the set-pieces in Carroll’s creation resourcefully. There’s a pleasing vigour to the mad accelerandi in her voicing of the White Rabbit (Andrew Watts), cool beauty in the boys’ choir refrain of ‘Beautiful Soup!’, and a hint of Gerald Barry-like disruptive mirth in ‘Speak roughly to your little boy’ as Jenni Banks’s psychotic Duchess swings the swaddled pig-baby over her head.