Wonder.land: how Damon Albarn and the National Theatre recreated a classic

This article was first published in the December 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Wonder.land is a virtual rabbit hole. The musical, which debuts at London's National Theatre in November, gives Lewis Carroll's psychedelic children's classic a 21st-century makeover, with Alice falling into a labyrinthine web of internet memes. "Alice in Wonderland is the tale of a girl who goes into a mysterious place where there are no adults from her own world," says director Rufus Norris, 50. "The internet is the rabbit hole that young people 
escape down now, for all the same reasons.

In the new play, brought to life by Damon Albarn's songs and Moira Buffini's libretto, Alice is a troubled tween who uses her phone to escape into a Second Life-like online world where she can engage in heroic feats.

For Norris, who took over as the National's artistic director in March 2015, the biggest challenge with reimagining Carroll's tale as a modern fable was that "it doesn't contain anything that resembles a narrative. There are very strong images and episodes and some recurrent themes. But theatre is driven by story."

Wonder.land is only loosely based on Carroll's novel, with many of the book's characters -- Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit -- featured in a cyberpunk guise as denizens of the virtual world.

Some of them will be recreated digitally, on vast screens behind the stage, which show much of the action in Alice's virtual dream. Lysander Ashton, creative director of London-based studio 59 Productions -- the company has worked on some of the West End's biggest shows, as well as the 2012 Olympics' opening ceremony -- designed the world and the characters. Wonder.land, he says, is the first theatre piece developed using motion-capture, which 59 used for Alice's on-screen avatar and the ever-grinning Cheshire Cat. "For Alice, we used a suit-based [motion-capture] technology," Ashton says. "We'd bring the suits to a rehearsal room rather than taking everything to a studio. For the cat, which only appears as a head, we did facial motion capture."

The screens will also be put to use to enhance the actions of the human characters on stage. "There will be real characters who, say, are having a fight, and the screens will provide a digital environment around them, with live video-game-style effects," Ashton explains.

Ashton, 32, reveals that he sifted through more than 1,000 versions of Alice in Wonderland -- from films to comics and video games -- before coming up with his own interpretation of Carroll's world, which he modelled after the "biological shapes" of amoebas, coral reefs and other microorganisms.

Ashton admits that the play's appearance was also influenced by puzzle video games such as Monument Valley, whereas in order to flesh out the play's most frightening scenes, he looked at tween-only websites. "I spent many hours on kid's online networks, like Habbo Hotel and Pokemini," he says. "Those I found particularly horrible."

The web, he says, makes a striking parallel for Carroll's surreal fictional world. "We looked at a lot of memes," he says. "You can't think about the Cheshire Cat without thinking about all the cat memes on the internet."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK