You Just Haven't Earned it: Wonderland and its message

There are many different ways to review theatre - from the 'I liked it so it's good' school through the more cerebral approaches of academia, and they all have their place in the ecosystem of theatrical critique. There's not much need for another theory on how reviews can be effective, but let's get into this anyway.

Yes, but has it earned it?

If a performance has a message or meaning, it's not unreasonable to ask whether the performance has earned the right to express it. Taking Wonderland, the 'inspirational' musical, as an example (possibly because it proper hacked me off), I'll see whether I can unpack this idea.

Wonderland is based on Lewis Carroll's Alice novels, updated to the high energy era of contemporary consumerism and replaces Carroll's naif heroine with a woman hitting forty. At the crucial point of the action, Alice makes a speech in which she recognises how her self-esteem had been destroyed by her ex-husband. He is castigated as 'gutless', she realises her own potential, and the audience applauds Alice's new frame of mind. It's a potent slice of rhetoric and exposes a toxic power dynamic that maintains male domestic dominance.

However, Alice delivers this speech surrounded by the characters of Adventure in Wonderland: the White Rabbit, a caterpillar and probably a Mad March Hare and a Cheshire Cat. Nothing expresses serious intention more than a cast dressed up in fairy-tale costumes.

It's not as if the revelation hasn't been signposted, though. In the very first song, Alice has her car jacked, gets the boot from her rubbish job and finds out her ex-husband is remarrying. Just to make sure that this isn't glossed over, she drops her house keys down the drain and her daughter has to get dinner. Alice spends most of the first act moaning about her thwarted ambitions, never forgetting to mention her ex-husband's beliefs about a woman's place in the home. 

However, this isn't a domestic drama: it's a musical, and the apparently random arrival of the White Rabbit begins a fantastical journey. By the time Alice makes her grand speech, a Mad Hatter's Tea Party and a funky number from the caterpillar has moved the action into the world of magic. The shift of tone back to social realism - and pretty blunt rhetoric - is jarring.

Quite how seriously a message advocating change can be taken in a production that, in place of character development, Alice jumps through a magic mirror to become the person she'd like to be, is an open question: and, in the absence of any evidence of the ex-husband's abusive behaviour (he never appears), the sincerity of Alice's conversion could be questioned. I mean, does he pay child support? Is she simply scapegoating him for her own lack of confidence? I've got the number for Jeremy Kyle here if we want to get to the bottom of this...

But that's not the real problem. The positive parts of Alice's change - a new found belief in herself - are simply plot points, and the speech is applause bait. There's no real attempt to explore what change might mean, or how it can happen.

Ah - you reply: this is theatre. Musical theatre. Escapism. It's not supposed to be realism. It's feel good fun...

...in which case, it doesn't get to gesture towards real issues for approval. Making a big point of how shit the protagonist's life is, and how important it is to get back to real life...