Poor old Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. As the famous movie phrase goes, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. In this case, the legend has been staged, rather than printed - even if it makes its subject look like a mad, muse-hungry suspected paedo.
This play, written in 2010 by Nathan Shreeve and performed on just the right side of melodrama by Schmucks Theatre Co, does not actually show us Lewis Carroll, far less Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
Instead we see the uncomfortable mental anguish of "Lewis Carroll": a version of the man created, by accident or design, by various early biographers and by Dodgson himself. Carroll, by these portraits, was not interested in adult women, was in love with - may even have proposed to - the real Alice, used her as a muse and heroine of the stories, and enjoyed taking photos of kids in the nude.
None of the above assertions, most modern Carroll scholars argue, are true, with one exception: he did take nude photos of children (among other subjects), as was commonplace in Victorian society: images of naked children were symbolic of innocence, pure and simple. Shreeve is clearly aware of and nodding to this: the play's title comes from the term coined by writer Karoline Leach to sum up the old simplified, untrue received wisdom around the nineteenth-century writer.
Even so, it is the at times uncomfortable, quease-inducing legend we get. Inevitably for this hour and a quarter we look through a glass darkly at Carroll, viewing via our own prism of media-fuelled paranoia about kiddie fiddlers, paradoxically in a consumer culture where it never seems to occur to some profit- chasing geniuses that sexualising girls ever earlier is, well, wrong. There is something to think on here; that it is we who have lost innocence, and our modern, mistrusting sensibilities which taint what may to other eyes have appeared perfectly benign.
The play begins with Carroll going slightly mad, harrassed by his Wonderland characters turning up and noisily demanding his attentions, to the point where it is getting in the way of his quotidian life as a teacher of logic and mathematics. He has tried to ignore his imaginary tormentors, but they just get more intrusive. Worse, his beloved child muse - Alice Liddell, his boss's daughter - doesn't care for nonsense like Jabberwocky: she wants to hear another of "her" adventures. And the boss is concerned that if Dodgson publishes such rubbish under his real name, he will be ruined - exposed as a madman with an overactive, useless imagination. Hence Dodgson becomes Carroll.
Across dark, energetically played scenes, the writer becomes more feverish, real and imagined worlds blend ever more confusingly, with fairly obvious clues as to who his inspirations were for the Mad Hatter, Red Queen and the rest of the surreal gang. Eventually Carroll is banned from seeing Alice, such is the concern over his febrile mental state. Some time later, he appears to be over her, and to have calmed down considerably - but has he? Shreeve's Carroll is a man desperately trying to keep control of his imagination and its creations, his sanity and his desires. The interspersing of extracts from Carroll's works is appositely done and suggests darker edges to the fantastical worlds he created.
There are no false notes hit by the cast, with two slight and curious exceptions, for which perhaps we should be grateful. Joshua Ogle as Carroll is too young and handsome, Eleri Jones as 11-year-old Alice too grown up and - careful saying this - attractive. They look too damn good together, and the teasing, sulking and heat between them - careful again - is played more akin to boyfriend/girlfriend than forbidden, suppressed affections of Victorian adult/child. I say perhaps we should be grateful for this because the play is plenty dark enough without making the gulf between author and muse look yet more Lolita-like.
That aside, this is a spiritedly-performed play with a well sustained atmosphere. Modern Carroll scholars who see it may well petition for a clarifying disclaimer to be issued, at the end of a work which casts a bleak light on our own world more than it illuminates the facts of Carroll's.
The Carroll Myth
Sweet Grassmarket: City 1, till Aug 29