Cross Carroll's Alice stories with Alfred Jarry's surrealist essay The Crucifixion Of Jesus Christ Considered As An Uphill Cycle Race, add a large pinch of allegorical significance, and this is what you get: a bit of meaningful blindness, multiple levels of reality (it's – gasp! – set in an empty theatre), the mystical otherness of women – because, in as many words, they don't have dicks – and the constant theme of striving and being thwarted, having to resort to subterfuge and corruption to have any hope of real achievement. There are some jokes, and there is some deeper meaning, but not as much as director Michael Axinn probably hopes or believes; likewise, its theatrical challenges are now evaporated by the passage of time, leaving only a residue of "mildly engaging, perhaps, but..."
Written for City Limits magazine.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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