Christopher Wheeldon doesn't just stage Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—he basically rebuilds the rabbit hole in motion. And somehow, impossibly, makes you believe every impossible thing.
I've watched a lot of ballet. You start to developskeptic's eye after a while—the machinery behind the magic becomes too visible, the seams show. But Wheeldon's Alice at the Royal Ballet has this quality where the technique disappears into the storytelling until you forget you're watching dancers at all. You're just... watching Wonderland happen.
The opening alone sets this tone—a young woman in white, simple as a breath, standing in what could be a garden. Then the orchestra shifts and suddenly nothing is where it should be. The set doesn't just change; it warps. Joby Talbot's score does something sneaky where the music feels playful but carries this undercurrent of unease, like a waltz at a party where everyone's hiding something. That's Lewis Carroll's whole deal, really—nonsense that isn't nonsense, logic that bends—and Wheeldon gets it. The choreography follows Carroll's logic literally: bodies move in ways that violate everything classical ballet teaches, but somehow feel inevitable.
The Mad Hatter's tea party sequence is where most people lose their minds, and rightfully so. Picture this: a long table stretched across the stage at a impossible angle, and the dancers aren't just dancing around it—they're using it like a gymnastics apparatus, swinging and flipping and catching each other with this controlled chaos that seems to say "we could all die right now but we won't." The ensemble moves as one unit, tables and all, like watching a Rube Goldberg machine made of humans. There's genuine danger in it—the speed, the lifts, the way they tumble over and under each other. You feel the risk. That's what separates good choreography from great: the audience senses that the dancers are truly committing to something, not just executing steps safely.
Then there's the Queen of Hearts' court, and this is where the production shifts registers entirely. Gone is the whimsy. The costumes go dark, the lighting goes surgical, and suddenly we're in something closer to a thriller. The choreography here is all precision and threat—rows of playing card soldiers who move with unsettling uniformity, their arms cutting through the air in unison. It shouldn't be scary. It absolutely is. Wheeldon understands that horror lives in the uncanny, in things that should be human but aren't quite.
FT called it "richly fruited," which is perfect—the production sprawls with visual abundance, every surface covered in color and texture and movement. But Bachtrack's more measured take hits something true too: there are moments where the spectacle almost overwhelms the story, where you're so busy looking at the magnificent nothing that you forget to feel anything about the girl at the center of it. The projectionwork and the set changes are so dazzling that Alice herself can feel almost incidental.
That's the production's quiet tension, actually—Alice wants to be both a technical marvel and an emotional journey, and sometimes those goals work against each other.
But here's the thing: I've seen this three times now, and I keep noticing new details in the staging that I missed before. The kind of details that suggest Wheeldon understood this story better than most—that Wonderland isn't just weird, it's specifically a child's weird, filtered through the particular logic of a young mind trying to make sense of a world that doesn't make sense. The choreography has these small moments of clarity, where Alice moves differently than everyone else—more grounded, more here—amidst all the chaos. It's subtle. It might be accidental. But I don't think it is.
You should go see this. Not because it's "good for ballet" or "accessible to newcomers"—those are insults wrapped as compliments. Go see it because it's a rare production that takes a story everyone thinks they knows and reminds you why you loved it in the first place. The Royal Opera House stage makes Wonderland feel genuinely infinite, like you could fall through it forever and keep finding new rooms.
Bring someone who thinks they don't like ballet. They'll leave converted, or at the very least, curious. That's really all you can ask from an evening in the theater—that something shifts, that you don't leave exactly who you came as.
Wheeldon's Alice does that. It does that multiple times, actually, in two hours packed tight with marvels.
