Alice's Adventures Under Ground – Royal Opera House

Image taken from the Royal Opera House website

The stage was set, the audience ready, with plenty of children watching in the matinee performance, all ready in anticipation of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, written by the Irish Composer Gerald Barry, with staging by Anthony McDonald.  

Perfect timing in just under an hour and as the curtain opens there is the helter skelter ride of Alice as she eventually reaches somewhere underground and from then onwards the audience were left aghast at the almost frantic music and chaotic staging.  The manic pace of the production and music, particularly the constant screeching top C’s were problematic throughout, but it was the production, however colourful, that didn’t give the audience time in this short piece to really consider and get to grips Alice’s journey.  Perhaps the production didn’t come to terms with Lewis Carroll’s intellectual wit and thus the audience were constantly left breathless and confused and it wasn’t until the final quarter, particularly the tournament between the Red and White Knights, that some sense of dramatic shape became evident.  It was otherwise all too exhausting, even though there is no doubting Gerald Barry’s outstanding abilities in the score, which on occasions included extracts from other written material, including Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’.  

The cast did their very best to make things work with the coloratura soprano Jennifer France brilliantly surpassing the nightmare of singing just under 100 top C’s.  Allison Cook and Carole Wilson were the Red Queen and White Queen respectively and other roles.  Nicky Spence’s sense of comedy and vocal line shone through and Robert Murray, Stephen Richardson and Alan Ewing added to the comedy elements of the performance.  The music was caressed outstandingly by the Conductor Thomas Ades, but the sense of relief at the end was palpable.  

Was this an opera for kids or adults or neither?  Perhaps the only way to enjoy this was to pop a hallucinatory pill!!!  The children that the writer spoke to had their sense of initial excitement deflated by the end through a lack of hectic understanding. 

However, the good news is that it was only 55 minutes!