The Comedy
Contemporary Satire
Steve Nallon’s Adventures in Wonderland is a re-invention of Carroll’s Wonderland so there is plenty of scope for contemporary social, political and cultural satire.
The show has the inane Tony Blair as the grinning Cheshire Cat not quite knowing the direction to take, left or right, thus offering Alice “a Third Way” which will take her “absolutely nowhere”.
Because we live in a media world obsessed by celebrity the Mad Hatter (Graham Norton) hosts a ‘Big Celebrity Tea Party’ served with fried steak and fried chicken. Alice, of course, is not famous enough to sit near Graham as the Mad Hatter (“No room! No room!”) – and worse – she wants bread not fried steak or chicken. Alice is told in no uncertain terms that “Carbohydrates and celebs don’t mix – for we are on the Atkins diet!”
Modern education is also a target. The professorial Mock Turtle (Alan Bennett) teaches the ‘Easy Learning Shakespeare’ so that the “To be or not to be” speech of Hamlet is ‘retranslated’ for today’s pupils as “It is, it isn’t – isn’t it?”
