Planned premiere: march 7, 2024.
Since its publication in 1865, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been an incredibly popular children’s book worldwide. Due to its countless associations, it has been adapted numerous times for both film and stage. The wonders that happen to the protagonist in this story—as Alice wanders through a dream world—lend themselves to deep psychological analysis and can be interpreted as the process of a young girl growing into adolescence. Alice’s encounter with the White Rabbit, when viewed from this perspective, is symbolic: as if the animal represents the biological and psychological maturation happening within Alice, a journey every child must undertake by following the rabbit.
However, in Csilla Bereczki’s direction, the focus is not, or not primarily, on physical changes—like the growing and shrinking after consuming strange substances—but rather on the transformation occurring within a teenage girl’s psyche. Alice is at an age where she is no longer afraid to seek out experiences and is curious about the world. Yet she does not fully understand the events happening around her, so the boarding school she finds herself in within this adaptation becomes a reflection of Wonderland’s oddities. Since she is not yet fully aware of herself, the behavior of those around her mirrors the uncertainty typical of her age. The production, using Júlia Sándor and Csaba Mikó’s adaptation, highlights the pitfalls of adolescence—the moments that either build up her self-confidence or completely undermine her self-esteem—by exploiting the magical, hallucinatory nature of Carroll’s world.
Director: Bereczki Csilla
