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ATMO We all know the story of Alice in Wonderland, whether it’s from watching the classic 1951 Disney animated film, or the objectively horrible 2010 remake, or just by reading the original source material, Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’ It’s a classic
tale of discovery and growth, both externally and internally, literally and metaphorically. Al-
ice’s adventures have gone on to inspire countless other works, and her universality has gone
on to cement her status as a fine example of the archetypal young, plucky hero.
ART
THEATRE
Alice’s Adventures In
Nordic Wonderland
April 9 at 20:00 (opening night) to
April 17 at 20:00 (closing night) Tjarnabíó Price: 3,500 ISKCarroll Berserkur
Words Rebecca Scott Lord
Photo Art Bicnick
Okay, so everyone knows about Alice, but
why the hell would anyone care nowa-
days? It’s a fun adventure, but she’s just
a girl who falls down a hole into a weird
place with eccentric characters that rep-
resent various social mores of Victorian
England. It’s fascinating to examine, but
we have kind of moved on from that day
and age.
New Nordic storytelling
That’s exactly what the women of Spin-
drift Theatre were thinking when they
decided to create the interactive play
'Carroll: Berserkur', featuring the classic
tale with a Nordic twist.
“Instead of placing this story in Vic-
torian times, we started looking into our
own history and heritage,” Bergdís Júlia
Jóhannsdóttir says. She and the three
other members of the company, who are
assistant co-directors, discovered that
there was a correlation between charac-
ters in Carroll’s work and their own Nor-
dic folk history. For example, Iceland’s
selkie, who lives part-time as a seal and
part-time as a human, is a bit like Mock
Turtle, who struggles with an identity
crisis as he tries to navigate between two
worlds. There are also some parallels be-
tween Iceland’s Vikings, who tripped on
shrooms and went berserk on the battle-
field, and the Mad Hatter, who has some
serious emotional control issues, prob-
ably due to chronic mercury poisoning.
Another overlap with Carroll’s world
and Nordic tradition is the idea of non-
sense poetry. “Carroll had the nonsense
poetry which is very clearly breaking the
rules of Victorian poetry,” Eva Solveig ex-
plains, “and we have þulur, which is a very
feminine way of saying poetry, by sub-
verting the male dominant rules.” Similar
to the way that Carroll wrote in the tradi-
tion of the stories through which children
learn about the world, Bergdís describes
þulur as nursery rhymes, passed down
from mother to child in an oral tradition,
describing what is and isn’t appropriate
and what you should and shouldn’t do in
life.
An interactive experience
In keeping with the relocation of Carroll's
tale, this isn’t a traditional stage play. In-
stead of Alice being a little girl in a blue
dress with a cute apron and a hair ribbon,
the audience is Alice. Playing with spatial
and temporal limitations, the directors
usher the audience from room to room
like Wonderland's living chess pieces, en-
countering the rebooted characters along
the way.
While the directors had certain
themes in mind, they worked with the
performers to form the characters, en-
couraging them to bring in their own ex-
periences. This meant that things could
get very personal in the early develop-
ment stage, with Bergdís, Eva, Henrietta,
and Anna acting as therapists as well as
directors, in a way. The characters were
then assigned a room, and instructed to
work with their space to structure their
scenes.
Ultimately, the intent behind the pro-
duction is, as Eva says, “to show different
sides of the human being that we hide
away in society, the things that are taboo.”
In Carroll's story, Alice falls into a
rabbit hole and out of Victorian soci-
ety, where she grows and shapes herself
through her interactions with all of the
bizarre characters in Wonderland. The
growing and shaping herself part is key,
and the most universal aspect of the story.
So the directors have stripped away the
Victorian setting and replaced it with a
Nordic one, but they keep the archetypes
of the characters Carroll already had (the
Cheshire Cat, the Pigeon, the Duchess,
the Queen of Hearts) in order for Alice
to interact with them and do her growing
and shaping thing.
With the Nordic touch and some
modern themes, the production prom-
ises to be much more than a derivative
mishmash of shout-outs to Carroll’s rich
Wonderland (we’re looking at you, Tim
Burton). The women behind Spindrift
Theatre have taken the source material
to all kinds of new places, bringing a truly
innovative retelling of Alice’s adventures
to the stage.