【The Arts Desk】Peter and Alice, Noël Coward Theatre

原文地址：http://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/peter-and-alice-no%C3%ABl-coward-theatre
Peter and Alice, Noël Coward Theatre
【Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw step through the looking glass in MIchael Grandage's elegiac production of John Logan's new play】
by Sam Marlowe Tuesday, 26 March 2013
★★★★
                
                
What becomes of children “born out of sadness and loneliness”, exiled from Wonderland or Neverland, longing for remembered golden afternoons, but forced to confront the chilly twilight of adulthood? This new play by John Logan brings Alice Liddell and Peter Llewelyn Davies – the real-life inspirations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and JM Barrie’s Peter Pan – face to face, not just which each other, but with their creators and their fictional selves. Like the repressed, incomplete men who created them, they hopelessly pursue happiness, along topiary-lined avenues, across mermaids’ lagoons and down bottomless rabbit holes. In fiction, Peter and Alice are ageless, and always on the verge of an adventure. In life, they are all too mortal.
Logan’s 90-minute drama – the second work in the inaugural season by the Michael Grandage Company – is poetic and achingly wistful, with echoes of nursery rhyme and cockeyed, rocking-horse rhythms. It has an eddying fluidity and perilously languid pace, yet both the writing and Grandage’s finely detailed production reward close attention. And the cast, led by Skyfall co-stars Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw, conjure a potent, melancholy magic.
The real Alice and Peter met at a Lewis Carroll exhibition in 1932, and it is this encounter that Logan reimagines. In a book-crammed storeroom, Whishaw’s Peter prepares anxiously to greet Alice and his public. With its dirty glass skylight and the burble of voices from the gallery beyond, the room has an aquarium-like, underwater eeriness. Whishaw’s demeanour is suffused with a forlorn, defeated quality; he looks vulnerable, anguished, brittle. Dench’s octogenarian Alice, by contrast, retains a glittering glamour. In a dress whose flounces recall the child she once was, she’s imperious and yearning by turns, the woman forced by economic necessity to capitalise on her mythologised youth vying with the romantic little girl who basked in Carroll’s rapt attention while being discomfited by its intensity.
                
                
As the pair’s memories resurface and their young alter egos reassert themselves, Christopher Oram’s masterly set opens up like a marvellous toybox, disgorging layer after layer of storybook wonders. The drab storeroom flies away, revealing a giant toy theatre decorated with Tenniel-inspired illustrations. The Mad Hatter and the Red Queen perch in boxes; the Cheshire Cat grins from atop the proscenium. Here, Wonderland Alice in her blue frock and apron (Ruby Bentall, pictured above with Dench) and puckish Peter Pan (Olly Alexander) offer their wicked and unsparing, child’s-eye verdicts on the grown-ups Liddell and Llewelyn Davies have become.
Two figures in black – Nicholas Farrell’s Carroll (real name Reverend Charles Dodgson) and Derek Riddell’s Barrie – loom as large as the monstrous shadows that Paule Constable’s eloquent lighting sends stalking through the gaily painted scenes, emotionally inadequate, always demanding more of the children they idolised than they could possibly give, their affection becoming a tyranny. And nightmarish fragments of the past swim into view: Peter’s throat-cancer afflicted father, a horror worse than any pirate to his children, with his grotesque leather prosthetic jaw; the wholesale slaughter of the Great War; the death of innocence, hope and the heart’s desire. “I wanted to be an independent woman, like Jane Austen. I wanted to be a poetess. I wanted so much,” remembers Alice, who submitted instead to a life of stultifying marriage and whalebone corsets.
Logan’s writing is filled with arresting images. Llewelyn Davies, irreparably shattered by the war, describes his life pooling around his feet, as if he were a broken Humpty Dumpty – a motif echoed in the lake of tears shed by Carroll’s Alice, and in the drowning of Peter’s younger brother. But the play is more than an artful game, or a meditation on literary immortality. It is an elegy for the lost dreams of childhood, for squandered potential, a cry for love and the desperate desire to be thought of as special. It has something of the desolate feel of a deserted playroom; and yet it’s also, in its quiet, rueful way, rather beautiful.
【John Logan的新剧作，Michael Grandage的一曲哀歌，Judi Dench与Ben Whishaw穿过镜子走出奇遇】
   那些“生于哀伤与孤独”的孩子，被仙境和梦幻岛放逐，渴望着回忆中的金色的午后，却被迫面对成年生活的阴冷的暮光，他们的人生是怎样的？John Logan的新剧让爱丽丝·里德尔和彼得·卢埃林·戴维斯——路易斯·卡罗尔《爱丽丝》系列和J.M.巴里的《彼得潘》的灵感来源——不仅彼此见面，并且与他们的创作者和他们的虚构的自我面对面。就像两位压抑而抱憾的作者一样，他们沿着精心修剪成形的灌木围起的林荫道，穿过美人鱼居住的礁石泻湖，跃入深不见底的兔子洞，无望地追寻人生的幸福。在故事中，彼得和爱丽丝不会长大，永远离下一个冒险只有一步之遥。在现实生活中，他们的生命如此有限。
　　
   Logan的90分钟长的戏剧是Michael Grandage公司开幕演出季中的第二部作品，这部剧充满诗意和令人哀伤的不舍，带有童谣的回音与摇摆木马的韵律。这部剧有着涡流般的流动性和危险的散漫节奏感，但剧作的语言本身和Grandage一丝不苟的制作都使它十分值得细品。由在Skyfall中合作的两位演员，Judi Dench和Ben Whishaw领衔的演员则施展了深邃有力的忧郁的魔力。
   
   历史上的爱丽丝和彼得在1932年的路易斯·卡罗尔展览上碰面，而Logan所呈现的就是这次会面。在一个堆满了书的贮藏室里，Whishaw所扮演的彼得正在焦虑的等待与爱丽丝的碰面和与公众的见面。在灰尘密布的玻璃天窗和旁边的展厅传来的模糊的人声的环绕下，这间房间有一种水族馆一般的水下的阴森。Whishaw的举手投足渐渐充满了一种被遗弃和心灰意冷的气质；他看起来脆弱、痛苦、不堪一击。Dench扮演的爱丽丝正处耄耋之年，与彼得相反，她仍保留着闪耀的风采。她的裙子上的层层叠叠的荷叶滚边仍令人想起她从前的少女时代，她时而倨傲，时而温情；由于经济所迫，她不得不将自己被神化的童年作为资本叫卖，而抵抗那个备受卡罗尔强烈的迷恋，因而尴尬不已的充满浪漫情怀的小女孩。
   正当两人的回忆浮出水面，他们童年时的自我正在重寻自己的时候，Christopher Oram的精彩的布景像一个美妙的玩具盒子一样打开，一层又一层的童话奇观依次徐徐展现。灰暗的贮藏室消失不见，一个巨大的玩具舞台展现出来，上面装饰着坦尼尔（John Tenniel，19世纪英国插画家）风格的图画。疯帽匠和红皇后歇息在盒子里，柴郡猫的微笑浮现在舞台前部的拱形装饰上。在这里，奇境中的爱丽丝（Ruby Bentall饰）穿着蓝色的连衣裙和白色的围裙，淘气的彼得潘（Olly Alexander饰[译注：他在《明亮的星》中扮演济慈的弟弟Tom Keats]）顽皮却不留情面地从孩子的视角，对里德尔和卢埃林·戴维斯的成年人生进行裁决。
　　
   另两位人物穿着黑衣——Nicholas Farrell扮演的卡罗尔（本名查尔斯·道奇森牧师）和Derek Reddell扮演的巴里——则在墙上投下巨大的黑影，Paule Constable优美的灯光设计使得这些黑影在活泼可爱的绘制的背景上潜行；他们没有足够的情感能力，永远从他们美化的孩子身上不断索取，得寸进尺，他们的喜爱之情最终变成了一种暴政。过去的梦魇般的断片也在舞台上游走：彼得的父亲患有喉癌，他对于孩子来说比任何海盗都更加可怕，还有他突兀古怪的皮革人造下巴；大战（译注：在第二次世界大战之前，第一次世界大战被称为the Great War）的血流成河的杀戮；纯真、希望与心之追寻的消亡。“我曾想成为一位独立的女性，像简·奥斯丁那样。我曾想成为一位诗人。我曾经想要那么多，”爱丽丝追忆到，可她的一生却全部埋没于索然无味的婚姻和鲸骨紧身衣。
　　
    Logan的语言充满了引人入胜的意象。卢埃林·戴维斯经受着战争带给他的无可挽回的重创，描述他的人生倾泻在他的脚下，仿佛他是一个打破的不倒翁——这一主题在卡罗尔的爱丽丝的泪湖中，也在彼得的溺死的弟弟这里一再重现。但这部剧不仅仅是艺术的巧思，或者对于文学中的不朽的沉思。它是一曲哀歌，关于丢失的童年梦想，关于错失的无数可能，关于爱的呼喊，和对于被人另眼相待的急迫的渴望。它带有一个被抛弃的游乐室的萧索孤寂，而它的美感在于它的静谧与哀伤。
感谢翻译：Gawiel
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敬请期待！