Review: wonder.land

wonder.land
Oliver Theatre

The critics have been a bit down on this new musical with big reputations attached. It's a collaboration between Blur's Damon Albarn, celebrated writer Moira Buffini and the National's newish artistic director Rufus Norris. They were down on it when the show first appeared at the Manchester International Festival earlier this year, and again in this reworked version at the National.

I didn't see the first outing but, on the evidence of the second, and of the response of the largely teenage audience, wonder.land, which remoulds Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland for the internet age, is doing a lot right.

Its heroine is bullied school girl, Aly, who escapes from her tormentors not by following a white bunny down a hole, but by immersing herself in an online game. It's not exactly an inspired idea. But there is much cleverness in the way Norris's production simultaneously stages Aly's parallel internet and real-world lives. The action takes place in front of and behind huge projections of Aly's computer game. This is not the first attempt to represent the internet on stage. But there is a genuine sense here that theatre's attempt to deal with this subject has at last come of age. Previously, plays treated it as if it were a minority sport - or as if audiences were belatedly being introduced to a future that had already arrived. But this production feels utterly of the present.