If one was going to write the recipe for a classic British children’s film, it would probably include the following: adapt much-loved novel; hire fresh-faced young actors and well-worn comedians; budget for steam trains chugging over viaducts; ensure messing around in boats; add lashings of pop and sprinkle with a faint whiff of jeopardy.
Harry Potter lives to see another day. The Hogwarts wizard has made his stage debut in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play that pushes JK Rowling’s world-beating franchise beyond the realm of fiction and film to embrace live action: the bespectacled boy has become an angsty grown-up, and London theatre is much the richer for it.
This emotive, even emotional half-hour programme focussed on a famous children’s book, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, and its author, one of those totally astonishing Victorian polymaths, the Reverend Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). It was a surprising example of the ways in which words can change the world.
The spirit of the late Peter Maxwell Davies blazed in the Barbican Hall last night. Dear God, we’ve never needed his humane, inclusive vision more than now. It’s a measure of the man that his final work, The Hogboon, should fill a stage with hundreds of children, professional singers beside students and amateurs, a world-class orchestra – and Sir Simon Rattle; that it should be as rich and complex as it needed to be, with no concessions to its younger performers.
’Tis the season for big children’s choirs to show off their end-of-season projects, and the Hallé Children’s Choir and Orchestra had something exceptional to present under Sir Mark Elder’s baton on Sunday afternoon: the world premiere of Jonathan Dove’s A Brief History of Creation.
It shows you just how much Kenneth MacMillan changed ballet in this country that 1960's The Invitation, with its onstage rape, sexual grooming and child abuse, can act as the reassuring classic at the heart of the new Royal Ballet triple bill which opened on Saturday.
How much you enjoy this new version of Alice Through The Looking Glass will be directly proportional to how much you revere Lewis Carroll’s original text. If you love the original you will be perplexed, wondering if you have come into the correct screening. But if you don’t mind some liberties taken with the story or, more than liberties, if you don’t mind the original story kidnapped, wrapped in chains and thrown into a well, or if you just don’t know the book, then you might actually enjoy what’s on offer.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was an early experiment with modern 3D, taking more than $1 billion in box office, one of the 30 highest-grossing films of all time. Such tremendous, unexpected success demands a sequel. Six years later. Burton’s film veered away from the Lewis Carroll story, including the classic elements (Cheshire Cat, etc) but with an odd, some might say unnecessary, slant. Alice (Mia Wasikowska, pictured below) was 19, returning to her youthful fantasies, not the much younger girl exploring her current fantasies as in the original.
The new film begins with the same cast and atmosphere or the Burton original, set several years after the first. Alice, now a swashbuckling sea captain, deals spiritedly with pirates before returning home to stuffy Victorian Britain. The chinless Hamish (Leo Bill), snubbed by Alice in the first film, humiliates her by taking away her ship away. Distraught, Alice finds the butterfly Absolom (voiced by Alan Rickman in one of his final roles) who leads her through a mirror - a looking glass - and into Wonderland, where things are also glum.
The Hatter (a spectacularly creepy Johnny Depp, pictured below) pines for his family, presumed dead. Alice, inspired to help the Hatter, must steal the Chronosphere, a Tardis-cum-motorbike time machine from Sasha Baron Cohen’s clockwork Time who sports a strong German (or possibly Swiss) accent. Now Alice can get to the bottom of The Hatter’s misery and also discover why the Queen of Hearts, a wonderfully brattish Helena Bonham Carter, is such a stinker.
This all bears as much resemblance to the original text as quantum computing does to Pokemon. But it does make for a sequel to the first film. Burton is not at the helm, passing on to James Bobin, who has a long association with Baron Cohen from the Ali G days, and directing both of the recent Muppets films. As co-producer, Burton’s fingerprints are all over the first-class steampunk set design, costumes and beautiful art direction. But without him driving the boat, the film lacks some of the weirdness he brings. Alice Through the Looking Glass has a far more conventional story as a result: a quest.
While the story meanders far from the original, some of Carroll’s distinctive dialogue creeps in at places, notably the nonsense jokes about time and the perception of time. Talking of time, six years is a long wait in Hollywood, and the timing of this sequel is curious. Those aged 10 for the original would be 16 now, too old to be interested in this. Anyone now the perfect age for the sequel would have been too young to see the original. This means that the film needs to stand on its own, but it barely does. If you don’t know the characters or the slants of Carroll's original story then the story is perplexing at best.
Some scenes are scary, the Victorian design dark and menacing, and may be a bit much for younger viewers. But if you can see past the problems, Alice Through the Looking Glassis enjoyable, visually spectacular and finally satisfying.
ALICE'S ADVENTURES ON STAGE AND SCREEN
Alice, Scottish Ballet. It should be a capital crime to attempt an Alice ballet - off with their heads
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet. Even the best butter would not help this plot-less evening
Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Barbican. Gerald Barry's crazy velocity berserks both Alice books in rude style
Alice in Wonderland. Tim Burton takes on the fantasy classic
Alice in Wonderland, BBCSO, Brönnimann, Barbican. A curious tale gets a riotous operatic telling from composer Unsuk Chin
Jan Švankmajer's Alice. The great Czech animator's remarkable first full-length film
wonder.land, National Theatre. Damon Albarn’s Alice musical has fun graphics, but a banal and didactic storyline
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Alice Through the Looking Glass
Brand-new youth operas tend to fall into two types. One is hugely rewarding for the participants, a skill learned and a treasurable group experience to be remembered for the rest of their lives, as well as for their friends and family in the audience. The other, a rarer breed, does all that but also takes a gripping subject transformed by that strange alchemy of operatic setting, stunningly well performed by singers and players alike, and sears everyone who sees it with its special intensity. Nothing fits the latter bill like no other work of its kind I've seen.
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (Balanchine and Karinska in the US, Lichine and Benois in the UK). Like most other story ballets, there is no stable text - apart from the Tchaikovsy score, of course, but Balanchine was happy to cut and rearrange that too.
Michel Gondry’s last film, the unwatchably hyperglycaemic Mood Indigo (2013), was so arch and quirky it irritated more than appealed. Thankfully, Microbe and Gasoline resets the dial to the charm levels of 2008’s Be Kind Rewind. And things hadn’t been plain sailing before that too. The stilted, US-made The We and the I (2012) suggested that, after The Green Hornet, Gondry was a fish-out-of-water in America. Microbe and Gasoline is low-key, sweet, warm and made in France.