More than the odd playwright has discovered to their cost that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is harder to adapt than they might suppose. Yes, Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic is rich in novelty, wit and delight. But yes, too, its structure is episodic and its protagonist lacks agency. Stuff just happens to Alice, one thing after another: colourful but not dramatic.
Carroll purists would surely disagree, but in Gallus in Weegieland, Johnny McKnight makes a better fist of it than most. His version might divert from the original with a story about a girl travelling from Glasgow’s bougie West End to working-class Dennistoun, where she falls in love with a boy-rabbit, but it also gives this Alice Pleasance Liddell a motivation and an adversary.
Being a millennial, she is on a journey; in this case, to find bravery, imagination and love (and ideally a dance certificate). This she will achieve only by winning a good-versus-evil battle with Queenie of Hearts (an ebullient Louise McCarthy, the closest this panto has to a dame).
Newcomer Jorgey Scott-Learmonth makes a radiant Alice. With the relentless positivity of Ellie Kemper in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, she is blind to the threat of the execution-happy Queenie and winningly deserving of the affections of Star Penders’s immature boy-rabbit. Their inevitable kiss is hilariously delayed for most of the show.
McKnight, who is currently playing the dame at the Macrobert, Stirling, has spruced up his 2017 script to include gags about Ozempic medication, new Pitlochry Festival theatre director Alan Cumming (himself a former Tron panto writer) and Celia Imrie farting on Celebrity Traitors. It’s not big, it’s not clever, but it is funny.
So too are director Sally Reid’s company, completed not only by Catriona Faint, on superbly deadpan form as Hatter, and Marc Mackinnon, as a laughably lugubrious Honey the Caterpillar, but also understudies Jessica Donnelly and Aidan MacColl giving extra power to Ross Brown’s upbeat songs. It is all played out on a set by Kenny Miller that, with its clashing black-and-white stripes and checks, is somewhere between a liquorice mint and a dazzle ship. It adds to the disorientation of a deliriously daft show.
