Name: Alice
Start: 2017-06-27T19:30:00
End: 2017-07-01T19:00:00
Location: Bread & Roses Theatre

Jun 27- Jul 1

Can you truly ever understand madness and what makes a person ‘mad’? Alice is a production that aims to explore the theme of mental health through an adaptation of a children’s book but for an adult audience. The piece uses Lewis Caroll’s absurdism and surrealism to discuss and educate about the way in which mental health problems may present themselves and whether a person who is deemed ‘crazy’ is truly understood by doctors and society. The piece contains some masked political comments but in a manner which is light hearted at times and gruelling at others.

The piece will require actors who are capable of challenging sections of physical theatre. The adaptation is modernized so that wonderland is a mirror of modern day London but in a dystopian way. This piece combines the familiar story of Alice in Wonderland with new writing so that it is still clearly the same characters etc but in a completely different wonderland. The familiar characters exist but they say things concerning the theme of the piece that have not been seen before. Each wonderland character has a ‘real world’ background and therefore connect the fictional world of wonderland with the real world of a city in modern day.

There is a lot of multirolling within the piece as it is so episodic allowing actors to double up as other characters therefore the ability to change character very quickly while still maintaining full embodiment of the character they are currently playing. Alice takes a well known and loved children’s story and flips it to reveal how the story of wonderland can be a filter through which to examine mental health.