Alice's wild ride

ALICE IN FUNDERLAND Abbey Theatre, Dublin Previews Mar 30-Apr 3 7.30pm Opens Apr 4-May 12 (Sat mat 2pm) €13-€40 01-8787222 abbeytheatre.ie

When THISISPOPBABY presented a workshop performance of Phillip McMahon and Raymond Scannell’s Alice in Funderland over a year ago in Project, it seemed so complete, so well cast and so hilarious that all it really required was a venue big enough to match its ambition.

That the venue should prove to be the Abbey, which is now producing the most hotly anticipated show of the year, seems brazenly appropriate for a commission from THISISPOPBABY: in barely six years the company’s smart, endorphin-assisted aesthetic has colonised nightclubs, festival tents, theatre foyers and inner city BBs, so why not add the National Theatre to its list of unconventional spaces?

McMahon’s great guiding question, deceptively simple and conspicuous from the title, is what would happen to Lewis Carroll’s Alice if someone slipped her a club drug and set her loose through the fizzy confusion of underground Dublin. Seeped in club culture, trash chic, media sleaze and tabloid grotesquerie, it’s also a show with an optimistic purpose and big heart, throbbing to the pulse of electropop, beating in time with the city.

Wayne Jordan, who demonstrated his musical chops with the similarly lubricious Ellamenope Jones, directs a large cast so scrumptious and talented that even the luminescent Sarah Greene (left), as a Corkonian Alice led astray, might simply blend in. Curiouser and curiouser.

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