2024

Staatstheater Cottbus

Pop Opera from Lewis Caroll

One day a talking rabbit appears to Alice and she follows him into a strange world. Different rules apply here than Alice was used to at home and so an adventurous journey unfolds with encounters with crazy characters such as the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter and the Queen of Hearts. From then on, Alice changes size and language, forgets everything she ever knew and learns from things she never knew. Although the newly discovered world seems magically enchanted, the nightmare is also its constant companion. Only with the power of her imagination and childlike fearlessness can she exist in this world of miracles.

With his books “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” in the mid-19th century, Lewis Carroll established dreamlike writing, literary nonsense as an adequate response to a mechanizing world. With the help of the imaginative distortion of the prevailing logic, he not only exposes it, but also frees himself from it. And so Alice not only became the heroine of Wonderland, but also a cross-generational pop icon.

Using all the means theatre has to offer, the show creates a wonderland on stage that sucks Alice and the audience into the rabbit hole and tempts them to bring the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and, most importantly, the joy of the temporary warping of the world – the idea of nonsense – back into our plain reality.