Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
FIEPP
Cast: Kristy Andruszko, Boris Conley, Andrew Gill,Kevin Harrington, Sarah Herlihy, Val Levkovicz,Rodney Sharp, Julie Tompson, Hugh Wayland.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by William Shakespeare
Cast: Michael Barker, Jane Bayly, Maude davey, Russell Fletcher, Simon Hughes,Roger Selllick, Phil Sumner, Doris Younane, Caitlin Morris, David Wicks

Directed by Glenn Elston

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

FEIPP are never going to have problems with the Trade Descriptions Act. The acronym stands for Fantastic Entertainments in Public Places and that is exactly what these projects provide. Director Glen Elston and associates- designer Laurel Frank, production manager Russell Field, stage managers Helen Bradley and Liz Pain and musicians Boris Conley and Michael Barker- have returned to the Botanic Gardens for the Adelaide Festival.

After the success of Wind in the Willows in 1988, FEIPP have followed with productions of two of the most fantastical works in the English language- the Rev Charles Dodgson’s Alice and Shakespeare’s most poetic and sensual comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Outdoor performances can be fraught with difficulties simply because they are not inside. It is hard to keep a production together, for the voices to project and balance and for design and props to work effectively. Audiences can be noisy and inattentive and, in public parks, there are bound to be inquisitive onlookers who make the enterprise impossibly self-conscious.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a daytime piece for very young audiences. It seems that the time has not yet come, as the Walrus might say, for a performance version of Dodgson’s absurdist story that pays sufficient attention to its black and recondite wit and so ensures its appeal to adult audiences. Clearly,Elston has decided that this is not to his intention. Instead, he has added a few songs and former Funny Stories comic Hugh Wayland, as the Mad Hatter, has added more than a few jokes. The rest is Lewis Carroll via Walt Disney, whose 1951 animated version is now, in the collective mind, superimposed on the Tenniel drawings of the first edition of 1865.

Elston’s productions wisely recognise that in order to prevent audiences turning into Brown’s cows, they need skilful and genial herding. Andrew Gill both for Alice and Dream provides a comic spiel that unifies the audience. All wearing caterpillar stickers (useful also for security people to identify drop-ins ) we were gently shifted from venue to venue for the five staging points of the show.

Keeping very much to an episodic reading of the play and making no fuss at all about how Alice got to Wonderland in the first place, this production depends on giant props and skilful costumes for its impact. Two giant arms come ballooning out of the White rabbit’s house, the gardeners play ladder jokes, the caterpillar makes a soporific entrance through the top of a giant mushroom and the cheshire cat reduces to a smile in broad daylight.

There is audience participation also- aprons turn a section of the crowd into playing cards led by the King and Queen of Hearts who, regal and unreasonable on stilts, bicker and pout at each other and boss the little caterpillars in the audience into become croquet hedgehogs. Then, after the Gryphon and Mock Turtle and the Lobster Quadrille, we make one last trek to find the tea party complete with giant pot providing the signature finale.

Unevenly paced, occasionally desperate of script, this Alice nonetheless is good fun and looks good too. At times when it lost its puff and the littlies got wriggly, you wondered whether a shorter running time would help. But then again you can’t please all the caterpillars all the time.

But whereas Alice got a bit sleepy , the FEIPP’s nocturnal show is a dream. Elston’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream is a real treat and and is as pleasurable a night’s moonlighting as as you could wish for. It is witty in conception and brisk in performance and provides a marvellous introduction to the play and the playwright. Intelligent without being ponderous, lively without being banal, this production moves suavely between the various snares that often make stagings of Shakespeare the deadliest theatre imaginable.

From the first flares on the lake heralding the arrival by boat of Theseus and Hippolyta the play is entirely consonant with its environment and audience. Again, disarmed by Andrew Gill’s cheerful warm-up, we were geared to enjoy ourselves at the midnight hour on a clear Adelaide festival night. The staging, in two separate areas in the Botanic Gardens, neatly followed the action of the play- from Athens where the trouble starts, to the woods where all is magically upturned and resolved, and then back to Athens for the nuptials, savouries and an interlude courtesy of Mr Peter Quince and associates.

Glenn Elston has kept his text tight and his reading is genially light-spirited but what it lacks in complexity it gains in comic verve. It is like a comic strip version of the play.There is no dark eroticism, no poetic resonance, rather the story of crazy, mixed-up kids and their over-stern elders.

Russell Fletcher and Simon Hughes as Lysander and Demetrius are a couple of unworldly nerds, one in beach baggies, the other in Country Road moleskins. Jane Bayly’s Hermia is forthright but bewildered, Maude Davey’s Helena, as in Jonathan Miller’s television version, is near-sighted and bookish. Designer Laurel Frank’s feathery plumes gives Titania an Amazonian look, effectively played by Doris Younane. Phil Sumner’s Oberon, with shaven head and patched leather britches also looks to have borrowed Jon English’s mascara while David Wicks plays Puck not so much as a demon but as a good-natured featherbrain.

The players manage a ferocious amount of doubling -all the lovers are drafted as the artisans and Sumner plays Theseus as well as Quince. It is hectic work and the comedy has all of the familiarity of the best of local cabaret. The Most Lamentable Death of Pyramus and Thisbe is nothing short of a scream, full-on slapstick with Fletcher excelling as Snout’s Wall and Roger Selleck shrewdly mock heroic as Bottom’s Pyramus ( in all Selleck gives a top performance.) Interestingly, Theseus’ rather patronising encouragement to the mechanicals is presented as the rambling of a tipsy bridegroom, giving the actors a clear run on the comedy in Act V.

Glenn Elston has brought his ingredients together well- fine pyrotechnics, astute and quick-witted percussion from Michael Barker and energetic work from the players – and located amidst the carefully managed display of the Botanic Gardens , the contrived exoticism of the play itself is splendidly enhanced. Especially compared to the fusty bombast of the Festival’s imported Hamlet, this Australian Dream is a breath of fresh air.

Alice and A Misdummer Night’s Dream, Lowdown, April, 1990, p.37.