Client services: Michael Moloney as Charles Dodgson and Flora Spencer-Longhurst as Isa Bowman Pic: Francis Loney
Gyles Brandreth is in danger of becoming a national treasure. Effortlessly droll, a natural raconteur and a great gossip, his One-to-One one-man show on the Fringe is drawing punters of all ages to naughty but nice tales from behind the scenes of power and celebrity.
But in this tender, touching and sympathetic retelling of the curious relationship between Charles (Lewis Carroll) Dodgson and Isa Bowman, a young actress, late in Dodgson’s life, he is revealed, along with co-author Susannah Pearse, as a writer of some subtlety and depth.
How dodgy was Dodgson? The Liddells, parents of little Alice who was the inspiration behind Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass thought him dodgy enough eventually to terminate the relationship between them, and that in an age long before the current hysteria which all but condemns any man who so much as talks to a child. On the other hand, Dodgson went on to teach philosophy in a girl’s high school for a number of years, as well as mathematics at Oxford University, to great effect.
If the school governors had been able to see what Brandreth and Pearse show us here, they might have thought twice. Dodgson met Isa when she was a thirteen year old child star and piad her to join him on his holidays in Eastbourne where she had to dress up as Alice and replay entire scenes, alongside Dodgson, from the Alice books as well as other strange little games of mathematics and letters.
This arrangement went on for some years. The play actually dwells on their final holiday meeting by which stage Isa is 18. Even so, to begin with, it looks uncomfortably like a child prostitute indulging an elderly client with some peculiar tastes. But actually Isa, who wrote an affectionate memoir after Dodgson died, has come to love the jokes, the games, and the topsy-turvy logic of it all.
And so delicately do Brandreth and Pearse tip-toe around the potential pitfalls, and so winsome and entirely unthreatening – unsexual you might say – is Michael Maloney’s distracted Dodgson, that by the time Isa reveals her genuine fondness for him, it hardly seems dodgy at all, despite the age difference.
Iqbal Khan’s production has some nice topsy-turvy moments of its own – the March hare’s ears concealed under the Mad Hatter’s top hat is one - though it could perhaps have done with more in that vein. Pearse’s gentle songs, which punctuate the narrative, weren’t to my taste but they were all of a piece with the general tenor and prettily sung. Best of all is Flora Spencer-Longhurst as Isa, simply radiant both as a smart Alice and an Eliza Doolittle-like Isa.
Wonderland, Assembly,Until August 29: 0131 623 3030
