Last night as part of the Montreal Fringe Festival I went to see a dramatic version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was very well done, very true to the book, with clever costumes and a great deal of charm. The Lobster Quadrille was adorable. If you’re in Montreal it’s well worth seeing, and there are four more performances. (If you are Fringing in Montreal this week, I also recommend Paul Van Dyck’s The Harvester, an old fashioned SF short story in play form. It reminded me of Simak. Also Euripides Hippolytos, still awesome after all these years.)
The performance of Alice we saw was interupted three quarters of the way through by a fire alarm, and subsequently abandoned with the arrival of fire engines. The actors remained in character out in the street, which was delightful. It made me realise that the encounters Alice has in Wonderland are so random that a fire alarm and a fire engine don’t seem especially unlikely additions, and the theatre burning down is only another form of breaking the fourth wall to end the story.
[Read more: Alice and Celtic Wonders]