Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Winter 2010 saw four Cinderella ballets touring the UK, but spring 2011 is all about Alice. Just six weeks after the Royal premiered Christopher Wheeldon's Alice, Scottish Ballet present Ashley Page's interpretation of the same Lewis Carroll classic. And it's with a sense of deja vu that we watch Page's Alice tumble down a rabbit hole almost identical to Wheeldon's – a black-and-white psychedelic vortex, with images from Wonderland in whirling freefall.
From then on, however, the ballets diverge. Page's, created in collaboration with designer Antony McDonald, is much darker. Its central relationship revolves around Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) and Alice – an older man captivated by a young girl, painfully observing her grow away from him. Carroll's dangerous obsession is underlined by the photographs of the real-life Alice and other girls who watchfully peep out of the back-projected scenery.
And that frisson of danger is amplified by the sometimes wicked surrealism of the design. In the Pool of Tears scene there is both Luis Buñuel and Terry Gilliam in the large, disembodied eye, weeping swollen tears. The characters are anything but Disney-cute. The Knave of Hearts is an adolescent punk, scowling and delinquent, who looks as if he's less interested in stealing tarts than sniffing glue. Humpty Dumpty is a faintly obscene adult baby in a romper suit. The Gryphon and Mock Turtle are a sad shuffling couple of vaudeville performers. And most alarming is the Jabberwock/aka Queen's executioner, a lurching, gothic mashup of Frankenstein's Monster and vampire who has a habit of licking the blood, distractedly, off his axe.
But characters need a story to dance in. And this Alice, despite its wit and verve, never finds a clear narrative. By working with the Wonderland and Looking Glass texts, Page has not made things easy for himself, and the resulting structure can't be anything but episodic. Nor is he helped by Robert Moran's score, which is full of eccentric sound and atmosphere but has a dance pulse so erratic it's sometimes close to expiring.
Page is not a natural storyteller. While he gives each character a signature style – kittenish moves for the Cheshire Cat, pigeon-toed gawkiness for Tweedledum and Tweedledee – the details don't build into colourful dynamic personality. And Alice – danced with bright energy by Sophie Martin – is rarely more than a cipher. Denied moments of spontaneous expression, we can't guess what's going on behind her smile. Nor, crucially, what she feels about Carroll (performed with a touching melancholy by Erik Cavallari). This is an entertainingly inventive Alice, but it's a clever intellectual gloss, a pageant, not a story ballet.