Youth Arts Leicestershire - Alice in Wonderland
Young people from Leicestershire have been performing with Youth Arts at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the past 15 years. Youth Arts Leicestershire is an independent charitable organisation formed in 1993 which works to sustain quality participatory performing arts activities for young people aged 5 – 25 years.
http://www.yal.org.uk
Curiosity can get you into trouble. When you are seven years old you want to be grown up, but disappearing down rabbit holes, trying to open locked doors and talking to strangers – of the animal variety – can simply lead to total confusion and the possibility of losing your head completely.
Performances:
18th to 23rd August , 11:30 to 12:30
Price: £7.00 (£5.00)
Book tickets on the Fringe website
Beautifully portrayed with humour and music
Review for Alice in Wonderland
Played by Youth Arts Leicestershire – written and directed by Robert Staunton from the book by Lewis Carroll.
This latest exciting production, brought by some of the workers who have been coming for the last 28 years to put on plays done by Leicestershire Youth, is another great success. Alice is no longer a Victorian piece, though some of the language is preserved and the story with all its dream quality remains. With a simple stage set and costume, and an inventive use of stage props, the story comes to life in a new way.
Strong acting, humour, music and very mobile faces combine with a good pace on the stage. Performers move from acting to puppeteering to other characters, as the play demands. Alice achieves her descent into the deep rabbit hole on the stage, her many changes of size and is then amazed to see the sedate game of croquet turn into fast and furious action of many players. The end arrives too soon.
All this is achieved without auditions, by volunteers with a non-school commitment who are trained on the project in acting, stagecraft and other aspects of drama to a standard which gains them an extra ‘A’ level when combined with their regular written evaluations and their excellent performance.
I highly recommend this production, to people of all ages who enjoy an exciting mixture of reality and fantasy which is beautifully portrayed with humour and music.