Albarn’s in blunderland with an achingly PC piece
wonder.land National Theatre: Olivier, London Scripted by the esteemed dramatist Moira Buffini with a score by Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz glory, this show opened to respectful disappointment from the critics when it opened at the Manchester International Festival in July. The word on the block was that it had been extensively re-examined by Rufus Norris and his crack team of creatives before reopening at the Olivier as the first flagship Christmas show of his regime as the National’s Director.
It’s with no pleasure whatsoever that I must record how my reaction to this piece – which updates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for our online era – is one of incredulous dismay. The stage teems with top talent exerting their hearts out and you can feel the audience willing it to transcend itself and deliver that giddy high that remains forever elusive.
So what goes wrong? This is a point so fundamental to my dissatisfaction with the evening that I am in danger of forgetting to set it down.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the Chorus, in amused mode, instructs the audience to “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”. That’s one of the distinctive joys of theatre – that it’s an imaginative collaboration between players and punters. But it’s a pleasure that wonder.land almost systematically thwarts.
Rae Smith’s ingenious set design and the spectacular projections of the digital realm and its denizens by 59 Productions are sometimes breathtaking – I particularly liked the Cheshire Cat with its Terry- Thomas cad-like teeth and whiskers like twirling fishing nets through which shoals of Bosch-meets-Arcimboldo imagery drunkenly floats. But to enthuse young, first-time theatregoers with this particular art form, you have to leave crucial things to the imagination of the observer.
Which brings us to how (for my taste) balls-achingly PC are the proceedings here. I shall spare the blushes of a noted dramatist who once managed to bring in anorexia and racism within two minutes of the kick-off of his/her Cinderella.
wonder.land is not as strenuously righton with its scenario in which Aly (lovely Lois Chimimba who rises above everything) is a bullied, mixed-race girl with troubled parents who retreats into a virtual world through a seemingly polaropposite-perfect avatar.
But you sometimes feel the show would be livened up if the kids were given cards to play PC bingo. There’s a group number “I’m Crap” in which, for a sequence, the show teeters deliriously on sending itself up rotten. It should go with that instinct more often and more pungently.
As it is, you wonder how the project can have sedated the highly gifted Albarn into such nondescript-knees-up music and why Anna Francolini’s inhumanly groomed and jealous headmistress (think Meryl Streep in Prêt-à-Porter) should be singled out as a villain in a work where hissing is, so understandingly, discouraged.
My reaction to this piece is one of incredulous dismay