Lewis Carroll’s glorious creations Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass provide us with possibly the most wonderful and surreal collection of memorable characters in the English language. To enter this world really is to enter the world of pantomime.
To create a pantomime script, one of the challenges is to find a throughline, a satisfying pantomimic story to hold all the fantastical material together. And that’s where extra rabbits come in… Well, they do in my version.
Lewis Carroll gave us the White Rabbit, so why not lots of rabbits? Malign, badly behaved, knockabout rabbits. Pantomime villains are great fun to play and so having lots of pantomime villains just adds to the fun – and of course, the fact that the Wrong Rabbits of Wonderland have been digging lots of rabbit holes to try and capture Alice provides the conduit for another character to tumble into Wonderland – a principal boy, Harry. Suddenly we have someone to fall in love with Alice and create the central romance which is so essential to a panto script.
I first sat down to write my Alice in Wonderland pantomime script over nine years ago and returned many times to try and find the right treatment to do the story justice. It took years of on and off tinkering and experimentation to come up with the structure which would transform Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece into a fast-moving pantomime romp, with romance, jeopardy, big laughs, panto plausibility and everything in the right order – and believe me, getting everything in the right order was the most difficult bit! But now it’s done – and the story has the simple inevitability which means it looks as if I spent at least an afternoon thinking it through!
So, why choose Alice in Wonderland for your next panto?
First off, of course, is everything that your audience already know about Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The wackiness, the whimsy, the wonderful illustrations and the fantastical gallery of characters which are now part of the English-speaking world’s collective imagination. So, it’s an excellent title to choose if you want to break free from the more traditional panto script stories but still want a high recognition factor for your potential audience – and plenty to inspire your set design and costume teams.
Next off, is surprise. Lewis Carroll’s original creates an entire world, but the story itself isn’t a romance, and it doesn’t pit good against evil in the way that a pantomime does, so there is lots of opportunity to make the panto version a truly original re-discovery of a much-loved classic. And audiences love surprises! They also love rabbits - and there is something truly ridiculous about pantomime rabbits.
Of course, over 20 additional reasons for you to stage the show are all the wonderful speaking roles which make Alice in Wonderland my largest cast panto.
And finally, there is the joy of inhabiting the amazing world of Wonderland. One of the great achievements of English literature.