The disinterred and unfinished account can be read here, in one of the archival wings of this digital estate.

He’s a big baby.

I think quite a lot about how my early then subsequent reading of psychoanalytical material impressed on me the idea that mental suffering, anxiety and worse were largely a product of the subject’s immediate and local experience and that this, in turn, was distilled and refracted in the subject’s mind, often reinforced and renewed by ongoing family experience, for better or for worse. Notwithstanding my strong engagement with Laingian ideas in the 60s and 70s, wherein the notion of the ‘maddening society’ was lucidly, shockingly and, for me, attractively, laid out, I still persevered with the diagram of the ‘patient in a bubble’ that featured the marginalising of broad social input and seemed to restrict the scope of a maddening network to a very few persons, usually known to the subject. Now that the world has actually gone mad and may not be able to locate the resources for its own healing, it has become appropriate to characterise it as a psychotic terrain stippled with pockets of sorely tested mental integrity.

The big baby was shouting at the intersection of the nursery and the supermarket - two locales in which desire is impassioned. While the guardians of the nursery impart the management of impulse, this requirement is waived in the supermarket, because you deserve it. You’d think that because you deserve it they’re going to give it to you. Don’t be silly.

It’s enough to drive you mad.

For the recent ‘Dining with Alice’ project I was asked by the director, who loves riddles, puzzles and jigsaws, to compose some riddles, in the Alician manner, for placing on the dining tables in order to divert the diners. I said I could do it if I didn’t have to come up with the answers. Deal. Here they are, in the order in which they were written:

And is there pie in these tall halls?
If the raven is ravenous what of the otter?
Whither the philanthrope?
Of what packed lunch is this lost carton?
What, in the name of crikey? 
Will Jack see Jill across the crowded platform?
Does the clock still tick its deathless tock?
What did the dodo?
What has Peter got, three arms and fits in a paper bag?
I have a full stop. What am I?
What is this tall?
My first is insane, my second incense. Am I?
Is this the way to treat the Home Counties?
Which well known ballroom begins with a polka?
My first is incredible, my second in Cardiff. Is it?
If the party of the first part parts, is the second party depressing?
A man takes three years to paint a room. What kind of man is this?
A girl and a boy climb a tree. Whom shall we inform?
Is the wombat the female of bat or is this a rumour?
Why does the pony trek?
I am my brother and my sister. How is this possible?
When is a jar not a jar?
How many light bulbs does it take to change society?
Is this the way to carry on?
What is black and white and a camel?
Why did the man eat regularly?
Why did the condiment?
Is an artist palatable?
What is the difference between a concept and a catacomb?
Why is the dog only visible from a considerable distance?
Shall we take the air?
Three men step into the road. Will they get there?
I am surrounded by trees. Who am I?
Is this strictly true or merely strict? Explain.
When will whatever will be be?
I have two arms, a personality, and some pets. What more could I want?
The rich man has it in spades. The gardener shelters in the hut. What?
If this is an answer then what is the question?
A dog licks a man’s elbow. Here, boy?
My car is in second and I am in pieces. What is it?
Look! There! On the horizon! Is it a bird?
Here today, gone fishing. Is that all there is?
What is between a difference and the same again?
When are the rough ready?
What is the difference between a rope, a string, a cord, a fibre, a thread, a hawser, and a cabinet?
What is the difference between a cord and a card?
What is the difference between a kid and a cod?
What paper is it that is widely discussed but never eaten?  
What is this that I am holding?
Where is the station?
A man sees a dagger before him. What day is it?
What is the difference between Swedish and this?
A three year old digs a hole. Under what circumstances is this permissible? 
What is that lives in a burrow, drives a car and eats blancmange?

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell them a hookah smoking caterpillar has given you the call
Call Alice
When she was just small

Carroll’s heroine is being confused with the spirit of the book in which she serves as an unenthusiastic navigator. While Alice certainly embodies Carroll’s antipathy to the stuffy formality of Victorian life, she lacks the playfulness and abandon with which she is commonly credited. The paradox that prompts this upbeat misreading may reside in the fact that the logic of many of the Wonderland characters is not actually nonsensical but excessively logical, to an absurd degree. This is not the same as their being wild, wacky or anarchic but seems to have been taken as evidence of such a condition.

The purportedly trippiest, most psychedelic encounter in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is between Alice and the Caterpillar. The latter smokes a hookah pipe and is seated on a mushroom - that’s got to be trippy, right? Probably wrong. The Caterpillar asks plodding questions and says nothing that is at all wise or excitingly unwise. The only direct advice he gives is ‘Keep your temper’, hardly a siren call from the healing maelstrom that is imagined to lie beyond sense.

Alice is constantly shifted across the line so that she becomes an eager participant rather than a small and conventional girl who falls down a hole by accident and at best puts up with the mayhem she encounters down under. Somehow her characteristic consternation and vexation have been systematically overlooked, perhaps because readers take up the invitation to identify with her but do not share her antipathy to inflexible logic, which is seen as pleasing nonsense. Her own misgivings are ignored as the reader simply invents a surrogate who is more tolerant and adventurous.

Tenniel has much to answer for here, of course. He supplies Alice with expressions that could be said, at a pinch, to service his employer’s need for a sensible, level-headed girl yet simultaneously equips her with a range of highly ambiguous looks that may be read as cool and sophisticated disdain, debauched abstraction or ravenous impatience - all of which are qualities of the pleasure seeker rather than the bluestocking.

It is the artists who eroticise Alice, if only mildly, who make her an active participant rather than a spectator. This tendency is to be found in the images of another distinguished Alice illustrator, Mervyn Peake (published in 1946).

Rene Cloke, on the other hand, is unambiguously illustrating for children and presents images (published in 1944) of a passive child subjected to a mad situation in a way that emphasises her unworldliness and vulnerability rather than her appetite for immersion.

Perhaps those illustrators who saw the books as charming fantasies gravitated towards depicting the child as captured by the events around her while those who sensed a darker psychology beneath the fantastical surface would produce an Alice who was the generator of her own dreams, one who would embrace rather than resist her imaginings. It could be argued, however, that if we have dreams because we do not wish to know about our darker selves then Carroll was merely being psychologically realistic when he made Alice so tentative and sceptical.

Tenniel’s distinctive sense of proportion was not confined to his renderings of the dreamchild. The cartoonist stripped the language of dream of its sunshine and imposed the shifty, shifting, scratchy and shadowy crosshatch that would unsettle nursery-dwellers for the next century and a half. Sloughs of febrile gloom and maniacal despond provide the dark ground upon which Carroll’s’s lighter fancy comes to rest, profiting greatly from the interplay with its shadow, so insistently conjured by the illustrator.

But is the darkness actually there? Without Tenniel would the tales not be delightful blossoms of absurdity no more taxing than the drift of a rowing boat along the upper reaches of the Thames? The short answer is that the tales are bristling with invitations to explore the abyssal depths but these latter are consistently overlooked in favour of jolliness. Tenniel reversed this trend, reacting as though a surface sweetness was to be expected then brusquely swept aside.

Notwithstanding the purportedly ‘factual’ yet debatable view that Carroll’s preoccupation with pre-pubescent girls constituted a perversion, this possibility was not the one so firmly taken up by Tenniel. It is more likely that the illustrator recognised, in the subterranean location and disjointed narratives of Wonderland, a territory that was not just quaintly engaging but psychologically rich and therefore deserving of the imagery of nightdream rather than daydream. Some decades later the Surrealists would come to a similar conclusion.

The invitation to the land of light, child-pleasing enchantment has been declined on a small number of occasions in the course of the history of the adaptation and illustration of ‘Alice’. In 1985 Gavin Millar directed ‘Dreamchild’, a film about Alice Liddell’s relationship with Carroll/Dodgson. The screenplay, by Dennis Potter, focused on the reminiscences and insights of 80 year old Alice Hargreaves, née Liddell, as she travelled to New York in 1932 to attend Carroll’s centenary celebrations. The film moves between Alice’s American experiences of being a celebrity, her recollections of her intense friendship with the author of the Alice books and hallucinated encounters with the creatures from the stories. The latter are fine examples of cable-control puppeteering, a pre-animatronic technology, constructed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and featuring the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, the Caterpillar, and the March Hare. The creatures are crabby, shrill and unkempt. Those with teeth have yellowed fangs and those with skin have livid, blotchy skin.

The lack of whimsy in the film is, more importantly, not restricted to those denizens of Wonderland who are ordinarily portrayed as wacky and cuddlesome. As Alice finds her long forgotten or suppressed memories of Carroll returning, the film dares to raise, quite tastefully, the possibility that Carroll was passionately in love with Alice Liddell. Ian Holm’s portrayal of Dodgson/Carroll elicits our sympathy with the author and helps us to be reassured that his inclinations were in some sense ‘ innocent’ and never actually enacted. The film moves beyond this widely held view, however, when it examines the impact on young Alice, as recalled by the octogenarian Mrs Hargreaves, who is seen to be haunted if not permanently marked by the experience of her girlhood exposure to the pressure of an adult’s amorous attentions.

In the course of extending the script of ‘Dining with Alice’ I was also entrusted with maintaining a blog called ‘Ruminations’ on Artichoke’s dedicated Alice site. Now that the show is over, some of the less production-specific posts from that site have been imported to this one.

A few performers later, the soprano playing the maid Zina prefaces her bow with a couple of wacky calisthenic moves that have earlier served to signal her character’s ditziness. Finally, the star of the show, the tenor Peter Hoare, having played Sharikov the dog-man, scampers on and pretends to lunge doggily at the performer next to him in the lineup.

Why is the show still going on? The idea is that when you reach the last page of the script or, in this case, the score, you stop. There is a lighting change which facilitates a clear view of the performers’ faces and bodies, which have been divested of all the qualities of their fictional roles. If we are pleased we clap and, by so doing, please the performers. Then people leave the theatre.

It’s even worse at ‘Billy Elliot’. At the end the lights change, the cast takes its bows but then the entire troupe suddenly becomes inexplicably loveable, regardless of their erstwhile showtime qualities. This is not, however, an opportunity to glimpse their unadorned workaday charm. They have assumed new characters! Who proceed to deliver a right old knees-up replete with teeth, smiles and the obligatory ‘nimble turn’ executed by the oldest member of the cast!

Let it go, why don’t you? The curtain call has an important ritual function. It reseals the envelope between a fictional world and the everyday, thereby contributing to the reinforcement of the psychological skill known as ‘reality testing’. We must assume, given the leakages I have described, that the premium placed on such skills has been significantly reduced. We may now feel safer in imagining that Zina the Maid is downing a glass of vodka in The Salisbury in St Martins Lane, just up from the Coliseum, before returning to her flat in either Maida Vale or below stairs in her employer’s house in Moscow, depending on the levels of hybridity in which we choose to immerse these homunculi who hail simultaneously from fiction, our imaginations and the lives of everyday theatre folk.

It’s a harsh thing, the end of a show. As post-carnival suicide figures in Brazil attest, life can suddenly seem even drabber when the house lights come up. The possibility of magically maintaining a fiction in the eye of the hurricane of the everyday is detectable in fairy-tales wherein the woodcutter who helped out a disadvantaged goblin will be given three wishes, only to squander them on a succession of slapup feeds. As Jack Zipes has pointed out, the benighted mortals of the forest do not wish for social change that might alleviate their feudal misery because they cannot conceive of such a scenario, even in their most magical dreams. When a show with its heart in a progressive place, such as ‘Billy Elliot’, is hijacked by the sentimentality of West End actors who refuse to go home then not only is everyday life betrayed but it is as if the political aspirations embedded in the work are actuated and thereby instantly depotentiated. The distance between fiction and reality is collapsed thereby neutralising any leverage inhering in the fiction.

Chastising the actors for their indulgence is beside the point. It may be that they sense that their refusal of ritual will be warmly received in a climate in which the only defence against a predatory reality lies in chronic, concerted fabulation.