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OPERA
From left: Alice, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat
Reimagining Wonderland If Opera’s 2023 programme – which runs from 24 August to 16 September – brings opera back to the entrancing natural surroundings of Belcombe Court as well as to Wiltshire Music Centre in Bradford on Avon. Emma Clegg talks to Lysanne van Overbeek who is directing two productions – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Iolanta – and discovers there are connections between these two out-of-this-world tales
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ou’ll find fantastical tales, stories of intrigue and tragedy, talking animals and a high executioner in If Opera’s summer programme this year. Lysanne van Overbeek, who is directing two of the productions – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with music by Will Todd and Iolanta by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – has two very different pieces on her hands. One is an amalgamation of Lewis Carroll’s two endlessly reinvented Victorian nonsense stories, recently produced as an opera (2013), and one is a lyric opera sung in Russian in an established classical canon. Lysanne, however, does see similiarities between the two: “In a way, Iolanta is quite similar to Alice in that both of the main characters need to gather the strength within themselves to move on in their own lives.” Female empowerment is indeed a strong theme in both works. We know Alice from Lewis Carroll’s books as self-possessed and as a character on a challenging journey, but the narrative in Opera Holland Park’s specially commissioned version – which If Opera are using – is adapted to give a sense of Alice, rather than just her reactions to her surroundings and those she meets. “With Alice’s character it’s highlighted from the very beginning that she wants to travel; she wants to go to Honolulu and to Timbuktu. Halfway through the opera, Alice sings I Flew High in My Dreams, which leads her to find the courage to save her friends. We wanted to use this image and empowerment within that for the design and concept”, says Lysanne. 38 TheBATHMagazine | june 2023 | iSSue 244
Reinventing established tropes in creative works can change the pace, emphasis and impact of a story, and is the pivotal energy behind restaging existing productions. With Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland this is perhaps especially necessary because we all take for granted the familiar image of a girl in a blue dress who meets a white rabbit and goes down a rabbit hole, and a creative reimagining provides news ways of engaging with the Wonderland story. Lysanne explains, “The beginning of Alice is set up a little bit differently in this version. Alice arrives with her family in a pet shop and becomes entranced by a rabbit – she ends up in her own dream world and the rabbit starts talking to her. She helps the rabbit get out and then they fall down the rabbit hole.” The characters Alice encounters form a smaller cast than are in the books, but there are all the big characters we know and love: the White Rabbit, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar (who sings the rumbling Wonderland blues), the Dormouse, the White Knight and the pantomime dame Queen of Hearts. “Each character has their own scene to guide Alice on her journey. The White Rabbit has an eery but exciting aria trying to explain what is actually happening in Wonderland. “At this point the Queen of Hearts has arrived and it’s causing turmoil. This is one of my favourite moments in the opera where we also see four characters called The Victorians who are the chorus within this piece. The Victorians help us go from one scene to the next, change the set and they sing with the rabbit in this