There’s a range of canned food named “Big Soup”. It seems an appropriate description of John Logan’s latest play. Logan’s piece is full of a diverse range of chunky ingredients; it has fare to chew on, to sip at, even to trigger Proustian reveries similar to those of the protagonists. This diversity also applies to the quality of the writing: sometimes meaty and toothsome, sometimes thin and obvious. The latter, strangely, tends to be the case with the play’s principal theme, the relationship between childhood and adulthood: the more nakedly the players muse on such matters, the less compelling they become.
    
Yet who would know more about this subject than these two? The setting is an imaginary meeting in 1932 between Alice Liddell Hargreaves (then aged 80) and Peter Llewelyn Davies (35), the real-life inspirations respectively for Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. The opening scene, as the pair meet in a rundown bookshop store-room whilst they wait to enter a Carroll centenary event, lasts just long enough for the viewer to begin worrying about dramatic form: speeches begin to seem overwritten, and Michael Grandage (directing the second play in his company’s West End season) is compelled to keep his actors “cheating front”.
    
Then Christopher Oram’s dingy set flies out to reveal a gigantic Victorian toy theatre with Tenniel and Rackham illustrations, on which the main couple are joined by their pairs of fictional characters and the writers whose close relationships with them generated the stories. This is the point at which the gumbo really starts simmering as fiction, memory and multi-way commentary seethe up against and amidst one another. Logan’s writing is most tantalising where he approaches a major topic then stops just shy of explicitly acknowledging it. This is conspicuously the case as regards sexuality, in particular the likelihood of Davies’ brother’s homosexuality and Carroll’s alleged paedophilic impulses.
    
Judi Dench begins by playing Alice as a cousin to Lady Bracknell; the character and performance alike blossom when memory is set free, not always happily (both figures were severely scarred by World War I, with Logan mentioning Davies’ hospitalisation for shellshock but not his earning the Military Cross). Ben Whishaw’s Peter is always defensive and self-denying, ill at ease with himself (Davies committed suicide by walking under a Tube train in 1960). The supporting cast include Nicholas Farrell as Carroll and Ruby Bentall as Alice. And I, having been unimpressed by Logan’s play Red (about Mark Rothko) in 2009, am delighted and chastened and get to eat my words.

Written for the Financial Times.