'Better Paperwork: Welcome to Wonder(Eng)land'
Maber, Peter (2026) 'Better Paperwork: Welcome to Wonder(Eng)land'. In: *Ali in Wonder(Eng)land*: The Playbook. LegalAliens Theatre, London, iii-xv.
Abstract
This essay is an introduction to the play *Ali in Wonder(Eng)land* and to the wider practice of the migrant-led theatre company LegalAliens, published to coincide with the production at Jacksons Lane Arts Centre in July 2026. It frames the play as a 'score' rather than a conventional play script: a record of a collaborative, body-centred method of making theatre rather than a stable, single-authored blueprint. The play reimagines Lewis Carroll's *Alice in Wonderland* as a journey through the contemporary British immigration system, using Carroll's world of arbitrary rules and unappealable verdicts to satirise a 'hostile environment' of visas, citizenship tests, and border rhetoric. Drawing on the postcolonial strategy of 'writing back', the essay argues that the play goes further, 'writing forward': rather than merely talking back to the canon, it uses *Alice* as material for imagining a different future, refusing to fix the migrant as a single knowable type. Through personal monologues, the multiple casting of Ali across different bodies, and a deliberate formal restlessness, the production enacts Édouard Glissant's 'right to opacity': declining the demand that the migrant be rendered fully legible; and briefly conjures, in Jill Dolan's sense of the 'utopian performative', the felt possibility of a border that could be remade.
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