Alice in clubland upsets Lewis Carroll fans

Rock promoter Harvey Goldsmith is backing a show on the club scene
featuring images from 'Alice in Wonderland', and many references to drugs.
David Lister finds the publishers of the classic story are not happy.

A staged "rave" based on Alice in Wonderland and bursting with drug
references is to tour dance clubs, to the fury of the Lewis Carroll Society.

Planet Alice, as it will be known, has a high profile backer in rock
promoter Harvey Goldsmith. It will feature both music and actors dressed as
characters from the book. The "chill out" room where dancers go to relax
will have an ongoing Mad Hatters' tea party.

But the novel departure on the club scene of having what amounts to a
staged performance is likely to be overshadowed by the drugs allusions in
the script.

Allusions to drugs in Alice have long intrigued literary scholars. And in
the Sixties, American west coast group Jefferson Airplane had an
international hit with "White Rabbit", a drug anthem whose enigmatic lyrics
were capable of a variety of interpretations.

The new club show, aimed at the late teens and early twenties, eschews the
Jefferson Airplane enigmatic approach. In a typical extract, the narrator
says:

"The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts and dosed them with LSD. The
Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, and fed his reality."

The creative force behind Planet Alice is Debbie Sapsford, a clubs events
organiser, who formerly organised Monday night "raves" on Brighton beach.
She described the new concept yesterday as an "eclectic mix of interactive
multimedia mayhem and contemporary dance culture, theatre clashing with
clubland".

Fellow producer John Goldsmith, who is working with music promoter Harvey
Goldsmith (no relation) on the project, said: "Most clubgoers have taken
drugs. It happens in our society and very much in the club scene. We're
showing things as they are. Alice is a very trippy story and Lewis Carroll
was a user of drugs. We're just showing an updated version."

However, this was disputed yesterday by Kate Wilson, publisher of
Macmillan's Children's Books, which publishes Alice In Wonderland. "There's
nothing in any of Lewis Carroll's biographies that would led you to assume
that those references were intended," she said. "Members of the Lewis
Carroll Society will not like this. It would be sad if Alice becomes in any
way associated with something that isn't wholesome. It is actually very
much to do with innocence."

The preproduction costs of the Planet Alice project have been 40,000, a
fraction of what a rock concert takes to produce, but a large sum for the
club scene.

In the show, lasers project teapots and mushrooms, there are visuals such
as Cheshire cats and chess pieces, and characters on stilts and trapezes.
There has been one rehearsal evening to date, at London's Ministry of Sound
club, and now the show will tour clubs and universities around the country,
climaxing in a New Year's Eve event at Alexandra Palace, in London.

It is the first time that Harvey Goldsmith known for his promotions of
some of the biggest names in rock has been involved with a club culture
happening, and shows that the mainstream rock industry is trying to get
closer to what it sees as the cutting edge.