Alice in Wonderland Pantomime Script Spotlight

We're all mad about this one!

Our Alice in Wonderland pantomime script keeps Lewis Carroll's original world largely intact, and luckily the story has plenty of other material for panto to play with. Our story starts with the Cheshire Cat, who narrates the entire show in rhyming verse, and includes many of Carroll’s fantastical characters: the Queen of Hearts, the Tweedles, and the Mad Hatter and his Tea Party. There’s even a twist on the Jabberwocky you won’t see coming, and a bonkers baking scene with a rogue icing bag that our Dame, Duchess Battenberg, can’t seem to get a handle on.

Synopsis

Alice tumbles into Wonderland, landing alongside Duchess Battenberg, the Royal Baker, who has tarts to make and a Queen to appease. The Queen of Hearts has tired of having her beheadings commuted by the King and has turned to the Jabberwocky, a creature deep in the woods, to handle things more permanently.

The Tweedles are causing confusion, the Mad Hatter's tea party has run out of everything, and the Cheshire Cat is watching it all from the shadows. When the Queen turns the Jabberwocky on Alice and her friends, the solution turns out to have been in the Duchess's apron all along. The Cheshire Cat has the last word: 'I'll stay, though we're leaving… now that's contrariwise!'

Straight from the Script

Alice has just arrived and needs some geographical context:

Alice: 'Where’s Wonderland?'

Duchess Battenberg: 'It's just below somewhere, slightly above Impossible, and a bit to the left of Perfectly Normal.'

Alice: 'That's not a real place.'

Duchess Battenberg: 'Yet here you are!'

Casting Alice in Wonderland: Who this script suits

With 14 principal characters and five supporting roles, including named featured parts for the Playing Card Guard, Alice in Wonderland sits among our scripts for large casts. The Ensemble plays cards, citizens, guards and ghosts across both acts, with the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and the ghost scenes offering good featured moments.

The Cheshire Cat needs a performer comfortable with sustained direct address, since the rhyming verse runs across multiple scenes rather than appearing only in the participation sequences. Alice carries both the comedy and the emotional arc. The Tweedles suit a pair who enjoy a committed double act with physical silliness, and the Jabberwocky can be played by a child, which makes this a strong option for a youth theatre group with younger members to feature. The 'piece of cake' running gag, introduced early in Act One and threaded through to the finale, rewards a company that stays engaged with it. As one of our unusual pantomime script titles, it also arrives without the weight of audience expectation.

All five supporting roles are playing cards, and they are worth handing to people who will enjoy them. The Aces of Clubs, Diamonds and Spades arrive mid-argument about which suit is objectively the most powerful and never quite settle it. The Two and Three of Hearts come on behind the Ace of Hearts, who is a principal and heads the Guard, carrying a bottle of rosé and a box of Roses. Small parts with jokes written into them are the useful kind, and these are those.

The icing bag is a build rather than a prop, and the sooner your props team knows that the better. It is one large opaque bag with two smaller ones inside it, both loaded with shaving foam, and squeezing different parts of the outer bag decides which end fires. That is how it obeys the King and defies the Duchess every single time. You want a second identical bag waiting in the wings as well, because somebody offstage has to fire the last one.

Six scenes play on a full stage and six in front of the tabs. Only the bakery, the tea party and the Queen's palace really need building as themselves, since the rest is Wonderland and two woodland clearings, which can be as elaborate as your design team fancies. Numbers are forgiving too. The Ensemble lines can be shared out however your cast falls, and the four Ordinary People in Act Two can be played by two performers coming on twice.

If those numbers suit you but you would rather the title did more of the selling, our Peter Pan asks for exactly the same cast, 14 principal characters and five supporting roles, from the middle of the traditional repertoire rather than the edge of it.

Alice in Wonderland Reviews

‘We loved this script so much. Completely bonkers and brilliant!’
Charlbury Amateur Dramatics Society

Request your free Perusal Script

If you’d like to read our Alice in Wonderland script in full before you decide, request a free Perusal Script and we'll send it over. Or visit the Alice in Wonderland script page for the character list and running time. Our home page and the All Scripts page cover everything else.