A distressed Lewis Carroll pursues Alice, and runs despairing, frantic laps around a jagged hole torn deep in the ground. His face a mask of love and pain, he takes the odd time out to conduct the hard-working orchestra of three musicians busily creating an earthy, South American sound. Meanwhile, Alice's moods race back and forth between esctasy and terror. The crazed girl, looking less like a prim Victorian Miss and more like a dishevelled war victim, darts about clutching a small radio, and dodging a doleful White Rabbit who has problems of his own. The mad Red Queen is as angry as ever but more powerless than we suspected. A nurse holds a strange infant which looks destined to be dropped, fought over and transformed - and it is.
Seldom before - no, never before - has the idea of nothing being quite what it seems been expressed quite so daringly as in Chilean/French company Teatro Del Silencio's dazzling and at times apocalyptically subversive Alice Underground. This is Lewis Carroll crossed with Dada and Otto Dix. Think of Footsbarn, think of Archaos and then think again; faster, stranger, more surreal, more fatalistic, more hopeful. This is urgent theatre of the moment, deliberate and unpredictable, as lucid as it is chaotic.
The crowd waiting outside the traditional-looking, large yellow Big Top on Terschelling, one of the Friesian islands off the Northern Dutch coast, on which the annual Oerol Theatre Festival is taking place, does not know what to expect. Apart from the fact that they know this is the show to see, and that everyone has some idea of Alice's adventures. She is crucial to the action but it is important to note that, while Carroll's story is a central thread, and Alice an icon of sorts, the Chilean theatre director and founder of Teatro Del Silencio, Mauricio Celendon, has brought a far wider political and imaginative vision to his wittily complex extravanganza.
"I used the Alice story because everyone knows it, certainly in Europe, it is a familiar. But it should be stressed the show is about far more than Alice." The narrative is as familiar as it is strange. It is as if the famous looking glass has become a distorted mirror and the more nightmarish aspects of Alice's adventures have been superimposed upon a surreal odyssey. Running parallel to the story of a young girl in flight, possibly on the run from sexuality, is the obvious theme of revolution and of people uniting. The show offers a brief but telling history of socialism in action. In several of the strongest set pieces, the chorus is transformed into a commune, whether in the guise of Russian peasant women or as a corps of seven Alices.
Having trained with Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux, Celendon makes no secret of his belief in the power and eloquence of mime and also of the enduring appeal of the circus: "More is said with a gesture or a movement than with many words. I want the audience to watch, to laugh, to cry and later to think," he says. The trouble with this show is that it is impossible not to think as well as react throughout. The mind and imagination begin to move almost as quickly as the performers, such is the wealth of images.
Masks and costumes are used to great, often grotesque, effect -imagine Tweedledum and Tweedledee, their large latex heads bobbing, scaling ropes. Alice's neck becomes longer and longer. Dramatic use is made of ropes, swings and ribbons dangling from the roof of the tent. Indeed, these ropes and swings provide both the set and the scene changes. As well as being actors, the Silencio troupe are dancers and acrobats, brilliantly choreographed by company member Christina Da Silva. While speeded-up episodes from Carroll's book, including a deranged variation of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, flash across the stage, a series of historical personages such as Karl Marx, Hitler, Che Guevara and the dying Salvador Allende also make guest appearances.
CELENDON is a small, intense character of 43, admitting to a love of black comedy and a powerful visual sense. Wary but friendly, he says: "This show is made so that the audience don't think during it. But they do ask themselves questions after it." As a spectacle it is the sum of its parts; amid the slapstick, the wild chases and the flying water are moments of calm, such as the near-balletic death scene in which Guevara lies suspended from red ribbons.
Elsewhere, the grieving Carroll cradles the dead Alice, while a trio of other Alices swings blissfully towards the roof of the tent. Childhood and real life are jutxaposed. It is impossible not to dwell on the imagery and symbolism, but Celendon stresses the abiding importance of the people, the commune. "It ends in hope." The final cascades of water could be Alice's tears, but they also represent "rivers of hope, rebirth".
Alice Underground runs at the Silencio Tent on University Road, opposite the main NUIG entrance, from Wednesday, July 26th to Saturday, July 29th at 8 p.m.
