Ali in Wonder(Eng)land review at Jacksons Lane: Bureaucracy vs. Humanity
LegalAliens Theatre’s migrant-led adaptation of Alice in Wonderland reimagines Wonderland as Britain’s immigration system. Its central metaphor is inventive, but the production’s most compelling moments come from the performers themselves.
The strange logic of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland makes it a natural setting for a story about authority, uncertainty and belonging. In Ali in Wonder(Eng)land, Ali arrives in England expecting opportunity but instead finds himself navigating a world of interviews, paperwork and Home Office procedures where the rules seem impossible to grasp. Director Lara Parmiani’s adaptation uses Carroll’s absurd world as a framework for Britain’s immigration system without losing sight of the people moving through it.
The production’s most effective idea is also its simplest. Performed by an ensemble from LegalAliens Theatre’s Tottenham Project, it avoids assigning Ali to a single actor. Instead, a blue hoodie passes from performer to performer; whoever wears it becomes Ali. It is a straightforward theatrical device, allowing the character to become many different people rather than a single individual and suggesting that Ali’s experience belongs to no one person alone.
The adaptation is less persuasive when it seems determined to match Carroll scene for scene. Some episodes feel included because they echo Alice in Wonderland, not because they reveal anything new about migration or bureaucracy. The satire lands quickly, then circles back to make the same point again. The production has enough of its own stories that it does not need to rely so heavily on Carroll’s framework.
One scene begins with a performer describing Persian expressions that locate love and grief in the liver. It starts as a joke about translation before gradually revealing how language carries entirely different ways of understanding emotion. The scene trusts the audience to make the connection for themselves. It is simply one person explaining something that cannot be translated word for word. There are several moments like this, with performers stepping out of the narrative to bring fragments of their own languages and lives into the performance. Those moments give the production a depth that its broader satire sometimes lacks.
The ensemble’s performances are similarly uneven. Some members have an easy stage presence; others are still finding it. Transitions occasionally lose momentum and the physical theatre is not always as precise as it could be. Yet the ensemble work has an ease that carries the evening through its rougher patches. The performers appear comfortable sharing the stage with one another, allowing individual stories to emerge without self-consciousness.
Ultimately, the Wonderland framework begins to limit the production rather than expand it. The more Ali in Wonder(Eng)land asks Wonderland to explain migration, the less revealing it becomes. Its most memorable scenes are those in which the performers stop carrying the weight of the concept and simply speak in their own voices.
Ali in Wonder(Eng)land
LegalAliens Theatre
Jacksons Lane, 269A Archway Road, London N6 5AA
Dates: Tuesday 14 – Wednesday 15 July 2026
Performance times: 7.30pm (both evenings); Wednesday matinee 1.30pm.
Elena Leo is the Culture & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
