Cirque Alice – The Civic, 28 August 2026: Review & Photo Gallery

Aaron Gascoigne and Photos by Leonie Moreland

29th August 2026

There are shows you sit through, admire the technical brilliance, applaud at the appropriate moments and walk away thinking, that was impressive. Then there are shows where you spend half the night looking at the person sitting next to you wondering what the hell you have just witnessed. Cirque Alice is very much the latter. I had my daughter Ava beside me, which turned out to be particularly useful because at various points I needed both an Alice in Wonderland consultant and someone to confirm that what I thought I had just seen, had actually happened.

From the moment it begins, it is visually beautiful. The staging, lighting, costumes and sheer scale immediately transport you somewhere completely different. What I loved was how quickly it stops feeling like a traditional circus production and instead becomes this wonderfully strange, slightly unhinged journey down the rabbit hole. There is so much happening across the stage that you almost become nervous about looking in the wrong direction. While watching one performer, another suddenly appears from seemingly nowhere. I caught myself more than once saying, “Holy shit, where did she come from?” It becomes part of the experience — your eyes are constantly searching the stage knowing something ridiculous is about to happen, you just don’t know where.

At the centre of all this wonderful madness is Layla Schillert as Alice, and she is outstanding. In a production where it would be incredibly easy for the central character to become overwhelmed by everything happening around her, Schillert commands the stage. Her vocal range is stunning — powerful when it needs to be, beautifully delicate at other times — and her voice gives the production an emotional centre amongst all the visual insanity. She isn’t simply there to lead us from one spectacular Cirque moment to another; she gives Alice a presence and warmth that holds the story together.

Darren “Dizzy” Partridge as the Mad Hatter is quite simply incredible. His narrative and acting skills are second to none. He brings exactly the right combination of madness, humour and theatricality to the character. In a production filled with performers doing seemingly impossible things with their bodies, Partridge reminds you just how powerful a great theatrical performance can be. He owns the stage whenever he appears and helps bind the circus, music and storytelling together.

The White Rabbit arrives, and absolutely tears the place apart on his violin. Raphael Papo as the White Rabbit was another standout for me. I genuinely wasn’t prepared for how brilliant he was. This isn’t simply a character wandering around holding an instrument as part of the scenery, this is an extraordinary musician sitting right in the middle of the circus. The violin becomes part of the energy and heartbeat of the production. Papo doesn’t merely accompany the spectacle — he becomes part of it.

The acrobatics move into another gear. At one point two performers are flipping each other head-to-toe, launching and catching one another with a level of trust and physical precision that is almost impossible to comprehend. You understand the artists have spent thousands of hours perfecting their art, knowing this doesn’t make it any easier for your brain to process. Bodies rotate, fly and somehow arrive exactly where the other performer needs them to be. There is a beautiful fluidity to it. Underneath that beauty is an extraordinary level of strength, timing and outright bravery.

These amazing acrobats are Tweedledee and Tweedledum — my daughter confirmed this for me (I clearly failed that particular Alice in Wonderland test) and here the production demonstrates it is also genuinely bloody funny.

The Mad Hatter heads into the audience in search of a “sexy man” and eventually settles upon a wonderfully reluctant bloke in what looked like an old-school farming top. He didn’t appear entirely certain that he wanted any part of what was about to happen, but by then it was far too late. He had been selected and was now, whether he liked it or not, part of Cirque Alice.

What followed was beautifully controlled chaos. The performers worked the crowd brilliantly, disappearing into the audience, breakdancing, throwing out increasingly ridiculous hip movements and dragging their unsuspecting volunteer further into the madness. Somewhere amongst all of this, Joe’s — our unsuspecting guest — underpants appeared, a particularly impressive little G-string, followed by his wallet and then his watch. It was ridiculous, clever and genuinely funny, and importantly it never felt like filler between the big acrobatic numbers. The comedy belongs in this version of Wonderland because the whole world is supposed to feel slightly mad and unpredictable.

That unpredictability runs throughout the show. Just as you’ve finished laughing, you’re suddenly watching another performer doing something physically outrageous. Flips, barrels, balls and plates start moving in every direction. At one point I was trying to follow what seemed to be five completely different objects revolving independently at the same time. Different speeds, trajectories and different rotations, somehow all controlled by one person. My immediate reaction wasn’t particularly sophisticated — “Oh my God, how did that happen?” — but that could be the most accurate way to review Cirque Alice.

I could continue naming standouts because the depth of this cast is extraordinary. The Tweedles, the March Hare, the Queen of Hearts, the Dormouse, the White King and the White Queen all bring something different to this wonderfully bizarre world. That’s perhaps one of the biggest compliments I can give Cirque Alice: there really isn’t a weak link. Every character feels considered, every performer completely committed and every new arrival seems to add another layer to Wonderland rather than simply waiting for their turn to perform a trick.

The ensemble is what makes the whole thing work. It would be easy to focus entirely on the individual acts. However, underneath everything is an extraordinary amount of precision and trust. These performers are constantly watching, catching, reacting and relying on one another, while the lighting, music, choreography and stagecraft move around them. What appears as wonderfully chaotic to the audience is clearly anything but. Every movement has somewhere to go, every performer has somewhere to be and every piece of apparent madness is being controlled down to the second.

Cirque Alice lives somewhere between circus, theatre, dance, live music and elite sport, and it takes all of those ingredients and drops them beautifully into the absurdity of Lewis Carroll’s world. It doesn’t need to make complete sense because Wonderland isn’t supposed to.

Perhaps my favourite part of the whole experience, though, was watching it with my daughter. There is something pretty special about sitting beside your kid and both becoming kids for a couple of hours, laughing at the madness, staring open-mouthed at the acrobatics and nudging each other every time somebody does something that shouldn’t really be physically possible.

You can analyse the choreography, staging, musicianship, lighting and extraordinary athletic ability in Cirque Alice — and all of it deserves recognition — but sometimes the best measure of a live show is much simpler. Did it surprise you? Did it make you laugh? Did it make you feel something? Did you spend a lot of time staring at the stage wondering whether what you had just seen was actually physically possible?