"I'm mad, you're mad, we're all mad!" says the Cheshire Cat and after watching the Duke's superb production of Alice in Wonderland there's no doubting that Lewis Carroll must have been absolutely bonkers. For the first ten minutes of the latest promenade play, the curious but rather bewildered audience follows Alice and the White Rabbit into 'wonderland.' It's an incredible journey! A baffling, psychedelic almost sinister excursion into the repressed Victorian psyche through the ramblings of Lewis's preposterous characters.

Forget Disney, the urchin-like Alice (Philippa Stanton) is an English rose with thorns and the impossibly queer folk who inhabit the world of her dreams are truly, madly, deeply off their rockers.

In between red-eyed caterpillars on mushrooms, songs about 'beautiful soup' and giant squeaking hedgehogs, we encounter a manically depressed milliner, a grinning cat from Congleton and a turtle who plays a mean banjo.

Williamson Park is just perfect as the backdrop to this lunacy and the original music by James Mackie is insanely inspired. Liz Ashcroft's creative imagination runs riot to conjure a fantastical landscape which is brought to life by quirky characters under the direction of Ian Forrest.

It was equally adored by children and adults. To the kids it was a nonsensical story full of spectacle and colour. For the adults a startling, comic lampooning of Victorian eccentricities.

"Mad, mad, we're all mad." For one manic moment during the tea party I could have sworn I was at a councilM-B meeting - it was so good it was scary!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.