Script Spotlight: Alice in Wonderland by Léo Woodland

Léo Woodland’s 45-minute adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic fairy tale is faithful to the book but is also customized—and customizable—to make it an ideal script for schools and kids drama groups.

In addition to being a versatile playwright and theater lover, Léo’s previous career was as a newspaper journalist, as well as a producer and presenter for the BBC. He currently lives in France with his wife and a collection of bicycles.

Léo graciously answered a few of our questions about his Alice in Wonderland script and provided some great ideas for how best to stage it.

Why did you want to write a script for another stage adaptation of Alice in Wonderland? Do you feel any special connection to this story?

I do like the story, yes, because it works on different levels—from the purely comic idea of a vanishing cat and a mad hare for children to a satire on justice and the absurdity of adults. There is the weakest of connections for me in that I lived not so far from Oxford, where Dodgson and Carroll invented his characters.

I'm sure there are many other adaptations. I tackled this one because of a meeting with a drama teacher when he lent me some of his drama students for a documentary on BBC Radio 4. His students were late teens, but he said schools for younger children could struggle to find appropriate plays because, of course, nobody wanted to be left out. Also, the more kids were enrolled, the more parents would attend.

The joy of Alice is that there are so many roles—two dozen or so—from the simplest to the more complex and certainly the more wordy.

Do you have any specific suggestions a director can pass on to the person playing Alice? What’s the most important part of capturing that character, especially for a young actor? Alice’s size changes are frequent—how do you envision staging those shifts (blocking, props, sound) so they read clearly but stay simple for school stages?

I idly thought Alice would be played by a teacher, who could crouch when she was tiny and stand when she was tall. I think children would find that funny, and they're quick to accept absurdities.

They key to the character, whoever plays her, is her innocence and wonderment. An adult would bring that out more easily, but there's no reason that an older child couldn't. In any event, it's a play to enjoy for its comedy and dressing up, not necessarily for any deep cultural insight.

Do you have any suggestions if a school or drama class needs to trim the play down to a shorter running time?

The second and subsequent verses of “You are Old, Father William” could go. I've already reduced it, and I'm not sure it would mean a lot to young actors. Other than that, I'd have no objection to reducing some of the longer speeches. I've tried to keep them faithful to the original, but they can wander into the wordy because that was the Victorian way.

I'm not precious about it!