The Maskers presented 'ALICE' to full houses at Mottisfont Abbey in July 2002

Alice

written by Jennifer Bartel and directed by Larry Bartel

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER – WRITER’S NOTES

I took the starting point that ‘Alice’ is all about a little girl who’s adult in her ways, meeting a group of adults who behave like children. Because the adults are still bigger, they still have all the control, and expose Alice to their irresponsible, reckless, selfish and vindictive ways. Alice constantly questions their behaviour, and is endlessly told that it’s perfectly normal, and that it’s her behaviour that is aberrant. The adults hold positions of responsibility, and Alice strives all through the play to gain the status of a queen so that she can be on a level footing with them. When she achieves that, they still reject her, causing her to bemoan ‘I thought when I was a queen too they’d stop doing that!’. She spends the whole play struggling to gain acceptance and admission into the society she’s place in, and has to endlessly compromise her own identity to do so.

The play took three months to write, and six months to edit! The Maskers held a company reading last December and after that there were three more drafts before final scripts were published for rehearsals. During rehearsal time very little in the script has changed, though a few lines have been scrapped, and a couple added in. Working as part of the company has been strange, because I’ve seen at first hand the difficulties presented by what I have written. The logic leaps that escaped my notice when I read my work a hundred times have stared everyone else in the face, the constant repetition of similar lines and words have hindered actors including me from learning their lines, and one question has constantly pestered me: ‘Where did Act Two scene Eight go?’ This scene was cut, but I didn’t adjust the numbering of the following scenes, so ‘2.8’ is a regular fixture on the rehearsal schedule and the play has a ghost scene – very Lewis Carroll.

Lots of people I know have been incorporated into the script. For example, Humpty Dumpty is really my eccentric grandfather. Some of the children I teach may recognize questions they have posed for me being uttered by Alice. Teaching teenage boys makes me realize how many of our adult rules are ridiculous, and a typical teenage disregard for authority and ridicule for the dictates of society has crept into the play.

Jennifer Bartel. July 2002.

Photographs by courtesy of Clive Weeks ( www.cwphotos.co.uk )