By Anoushka Jayasuriya
“Come with an open mind – don’t expect the usual Alice in Wonderland story” cautions the cast. Co-director Reihan Stephen adds, “Our play takes everything you know about Alice in Wonderland and just turns it into something else entirely.”
In a warped departure from the Lewis Carroll classic, Directors Nigel Wayne White and Reihan Stephen of the Mad Hatters’ Collective present ‘A Nightmare in Wonderland’ at the Lionel Wendt theatre. In this reimagining, Carroll’s fantastical tale filled with delightful oddities, is turned on its head and shrouded with macabre themes and chilling undertones.
The script written by Wayne, sees Alice reintroduced to the audience, not as the curious and cheerful young girl most have grown up knowing her to be but as an unhinged and deeply unsettled patient of the Wittsend Asylum following a brutal attack on her father.
The colourful and eccentric characters of Wonderland whom she befriended in the original classic now encroach on her fragmented mind and impact her waning sanity as sinister alternate personalities. Throughout the play, a team of detectives and her doctor try to piece together fragments of her mind as the truth emerges in a far more twisted way than they had anticipated.
The cast is made up of Sashyani Rodrigo as Alice, Mareeza Randeniya as the Mad Hatter, Nethmi Gunasekera as the White Rabbit, Yehana Perera as Tweedles, Jemiah Sourjah as the Cheshire Cat, Visura Silva as Dr. Marcus, Janindi Perera as Nurse Margaret, Shehani Guruge as Camila and Vihan Wickremasurendra as Constable Jenkins. The play is produced by Johann Perera.
First acquainted during their school days at St. Joseph’s College, Reihan and Wayne shared that this is the third iteration of ‘A Nightmare in Wonderland’. Their version made its debut in 2016 as part of the school’s inter-house drama competition where it was adjudged the runner-up despite them only having a week to write, rehearse and complete the set.
Deciding to dub themselves the Mad Hatters on the night of that performance, Wayne recalls, “No one else would have been mad enough to try this, at least no