A surreal television fantasy adapting Lewis Carroll’s celebrated sequel, where logic is inverted and a chess game dictates the journey.
Young Alice (Sarah Sutton) steps through a mirror into a backwards world where the countryside is laid out like a giant chessboard. To return home, she must join the game as a White Pawn and travel across the board to the eighth square to become a Queen. Her journey is a series of bewildering encounters with the land’s peculiar inhabitants. She meets the frantic White Queen (Brenda Bruce), the imperious Red Queen (Judy Parfitt), the argumentative twins Tweedledum (Anthony Collin) and Tweedledee (Raymond Mason), the philosophically fragile Humpty Dumpty (Freddie Jones), and the gentle, perpetually clumsy White Knight (Geoffrey Bayldon).
This ambitious teleplay was a highlight of the 1973 Christmas Day schedule, continuing a BBC tradition of presenting artistically serious literary adaptations for a family audience. Director James MacTaggart’s production eschews simple whimsy for a more disconcerting and authentically Carrollian tone. The dramatisation captures the book’s intellectual mischief and its sustained assault on the rules of language and logic. A formidable cast of character actors grounds the fantasy in performance, with Freddie Jones’s portrayal of Humpty Dumpty being a particular standout. The production’s visual grammar, created by designer Eileen Diss, was key to realising the illogical geometry of the looking-glass world for a television audience.
Broadcast: BBC Two, 1 Episode, Tuesday 25 December 1973
Dramatised by: James MacTaggart
Director: James MacTaggart
Producer: Rosemary Hill
Music: Herbert Chappell
Designer: Eileen Diss
Main Cast: Sarah Sutton (Alice), Judy Parfitt (Red Queen), Brenda Bruce (White Queen), Freddie Jones (Humpty Dumpty), Geoffrey Bayldon (White Knight), Richard Pearson (White King), Stephen Moore (Haigha), Stanley Lebor (Goat), Bruce Purchase (Walrus)
