Carroll classic comes to life with Blue Raincoat

By Róisín McGrath

Sligo’s Blue Raincoat Theatre Company is renowned for staging modern European classics as well as developing new writing and adapting novels for stage.

It is also well-known for its “very physical and visual” style of theatre, according to Artistic Director Niall Henry.

These skills will be to the fore from Thursday next, November 9, to Saturday November 11, when its “very fast moving, very visually exciting” adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s much-loved classic novel, Alice in Wonderland, comes to Galway’s Town Hall Theatre.

Blue Raincoat was initially drawn to the idea of staging Alice in Wonderland because of the scope it offered to create an exciting visual piece of theatre, in addition to being a good story, says Niall.

“We’ve found a couple of interesting and clever ways to show these things that many of us have seen already, in different ways,” he explains about how the Blue Raincoat version of Alice differs from other productions of the story, while preserving the original magic of the book.

“We try to play with the obscure logic of the play to make it more interesting,” he adds, “mixing it between story and visuals and hopefully, through getting the mix right, you end up creating the magical world of Alice in Wonderland.

“It’s about developing a series of ideas in a row that will all fit beside each other in a way that will become interesting, creative and magical in their own way,” he notes.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.