Jane and I are still reeling from the pleasure of seeing the final dress rehearsal of the Royal Ballet’s new production: their first new full-length work since Twyla Tharp’s Mr Worldly Wise was put on to generally indifferent reviews in 1995.

The only ballet with which Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can be remotely compared is The Tales of Beatrix Potter.  But the latter, as if making sure not to disappoint young and not-so-young readers, sticks closely to the stories and, especially, to the drawings. Alice, by contrast, uses Lewis Carroll's book as the springboard for a riot of invention.

Here are just three examples.  The Mad Hatter is dressed more or less according to the Tenniel drawings (as in the illustration above)  but he bursts onto the stage, in Steven Macrae’s breathtaking performance, as more of a weird tapdancing ball of fire.  And, although the croquet balls are - predictably - played by youngsters from the Royal Ballet school in hedgehog suits, the flamingos are lithe, graceful female dancers in white and pink Footlight Parade costumes, their right arms melding into a flamingo head, delicately snapping up invisible goodies from the ground.

And the Caterpillar is a vaguely Indian and decidedly muscular Eric Underwood, stripped to the waist, with an entourage of appropriately dressed female attendants bringing a hint of Bollywood (Balletwood?) to the proceedings before, finally, crouching down and heading off-stage  all in a line, hidden caterpillar-like under a long, green silky cloth.

We had already seen Underwood in the opening scene where he plays a non-dancing Rajah attending a tea-party at the house of Alice’s  parents. In fact most of the people in that scene pop up again in Wonderland: the parents as the King and Queen of Hearts, the Vicar and Verger as the March Hare and the Dormouse, Lewis Carroll as the White Rabbit, for example. (One thinks of The Wizard of Oz where the likes of the Tin Man and the Wicked Witch have their counterparts back home in Kansas).

Only one character has been invented for this version of Alice: a certain Jack (who seems to be a young gardener with an interest in Alice not to the liking of her parents) who turns up as the Knave of Hearts purely, I inferred, to give Alice an occasional partner for the relatively few pas de deux in the ballet. 

A further departure from the Beatrix Potter and, indeed, Nutcracker and Cinderella models is the use of puppetry, back projection and computer-generated effects.  When Alice falls down the rabbit hole she is first represented by a small puppet on a string, followed by an Alice (and audience) eye view taking up the full height of the stage, with a life-size puppet Alice crashing down, merging into the dancer playing her.

Not surprisingly this was not the much vaunted Lauren Cuthbertson, since the character is almost permanently on stage, and the gala opening was to take place just five and a half hours later. (Her replacement, Sarah Lamb, was certainly good enough for her to step in to the role for the actual performances, should she be needed).  And, indeed, the considerably less demanding roles of the Knave and Queen of Hearts were not danced at the dress rehearsal by the dancers who were to play them that evening, so this substitution was not the result of worries about  Cuthbertson’s state of health.

Though it must be said that the title character's time on stage is not, perhaps thankfully, matched by any outrageous technical demands placed on her by the choreographer Christopher Weeldon whose inventiveness, I feel, went mainly into sequences involving groups of dancers (notably the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, the Caucus Race and the Croquet Game).

Though when distributing plaudits it is often difficult to separate out the contributions of Joby Talbot (for the percussion-strong original music), Bob Crowley (for the  overall design) and the people responsible for lighting, props, costumes  and everything else.

One particular moment when each element comes together magnificently is when the normal-sized Alice is lying down, desperate to get through into the garden beyond and, suddenly, the music goes into triple time, glitter falls down onto the audience in the stalls and four beflowered dancers waltz their way down the aisles, all this a hint of what we will be seeing onstage when Alice finally makes it through into the magical world.

A world which we were privileged to become part of last Monday morning.