Alex Sudheim: On stage in Durban
On a boating trip in the English summer of 1862, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson held three children spellbound with the fantastical tales of a young girl in an imaginary land, all the while making hundreds of impromptu illustrations with a pencil.
Upon returning home, he wrote down for Alice Liddell the story he had told that afternoon: Alice’s Adventures Underground. Later, when novelist Henry Kingsley saw it, he urged Mrs Liddell to persuade Dodgson to publish the work. He eventually did, and in 1865, under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll and with the title Alice in Wonderland, Charles Dodgson published one of the most important childrens books ever.
Simultaneously a giddy children’s adventure and a metaphor for the power of the imagination to transcend reality, the book’s appeal among all generations remains unabated to this day.
Yet recently revisionist historians have begun casting an ugly shadow over Carroll’s reputation. His great fondness for children was manifested in the photographs he took – romantic depictions of childish innocence; beautifully composed, sepia-tinted images of Victorian children in the heavy, elaborate clothing of the era.
This, together with the fact that he never married, has led some to wonder aloud as to the exact nature of his relationship with children. Was the mathematician, logician, photographer, novelist, distinguished lecturer and ordained deacon in the Church of England merely a wistful sucker for the idyllic freedom that childhood represented, or was something more sinister at play?
This theme serves as a basis for Durban playwright Shireen James’ brilliant, harrowing play, Alice Threw the Looking Glass, which chillingly depicts the horrors of child abuse and the brain’s defence mechanism of retreat into an imaginary realm.
Calli Denton plays Alice, the 16-year-old mental patient, with power and grit, while Emma Durden portrays Alice’s psychiatrist with a scary blend of aloofness and mania. The patient versus psychiatrist scenario with the role-reversal of the psychiatrist’s own repressed trauma (revealed by the patient), is familiar ground, but James inhabits it with devastating originality, blowing away any comfortable stereotypes or preconceptions.
She breaks the limitations of the two-hander by giving both characters several roles -Durden, aside from being the psychiatrist “in reality”, turns into a diabolical Queen of Hearts or Cheshire Cat, while Alice herself slips from little girl lost into sneering, cynical, streetwise mode at the drop of a (mad) hat.
While skipping about with her stuffed rabbit companion, the psychiatrist admonishes Alice: “that’s enough now Alice, you’re not a child anymore”, upon which she whips around and with cutting bitterness asks “When was I ever one? I had it fucked out of me.”
The multiple roles of both characters challenges presumptions of what constitutes reality and radically questions the orthodox view of sanity versus insanity. This theme accounts for the play’s profoundly disturbing character. Matthew Fink’s dark, spooky score, together with David Gouldie’s voodoo choreography, create an astute blend of intelligence and brutality, making Alice Threw the Looking Glass a shocking and thrilling experience right up to the gory climax.