We sat down for an exclusive interview with Lara Parmiani, director of Ali in Wonder(Eng)land. Created with and performed entirely by an ensemble of 16 refugees and migrants, including two musicians, LegalAliens Theatre’s reimagining of Alice in Wonderland sees an outsider coming to a strange new land only to be caught up in rules that make no sense.
This show runs 14th-15th July at Jacksons Lane – Tickets here.
1) Ali in Wonder(Eng)land uses humour and absurdity to explore migration—why is satire such a powerful way to tell these stories?
Because the idea that the goalposts keep changing is physical theatre comedy in itself. You take one step forward, the rules change, somebody moves the line again. You finally understand the form, and suddenly there is a new form to prove you didn’t understand the previous form. The idea that somebody can be considered “integrated” one day and suspicious the next, wanted for their labour but unwelcome in public discourse, is absurd in the truest sense of the word. Humour also allows us to approach difficult things without flattening people into victims. Most migrants are funny, resourceful, sarcastic and often capable of laughing at situations that are objectively ridiculous. Comedy creates space for complexity. And satire has a strange ability to bypass defensiveness. If audiences laugh first, they often lower their guard. Lewis Carroll understood that authority often behaves like nonsense. We’ve simply relocated the nonsense into contemporary Britain.
2) How do you balance the political themes of the production with the personal lived experiences of the performers on stage?
Very carefully. I’m quite allergic to the idea that people from migrant or refugee backgrounds should simply “share their stories” on stage for public consumption. Firstly because they’re people, not case studies. Secondly because trauma is not theatre. The show isn’t autobiographical, but it is deeply informed by lived experience. We build metaphors, images, scenes and absurd situations that emerge from conversations, improvisations and observations. Someone might recognise the feeling of an immigration interview, of waiting, of being misunderstood, without us recreating anyone’s life directly. Politically, I’m interested in systems, contradictions and power. Personally, I’m interested in humans being contradictory and funny and annoying and resilient.
3) With participants from such diverse backgrounds, how has the collaborative process shaped the final production?
We have people who arrived in the UK thirty years ago, people who arrived five months ago, people with perfect English, people speaking through Google Translate, people who dreamt of becoming actors in their own countries, and people who had never seen a play in their life and are now somehow in one. That level of variety changes the aesthetics of the work and makes it inherently imperfect. As a director and co-creator, you have to embrace the mess and continuously adapt. You cannot impose a rigid process and expect reality to behave. This is actually a new version of a show we first staged in 2023, but the cast is different, so every scene is different. The performers have helped rewrite, reshape and reimagine them. Somebody brings a gesture, somebody challenges a line, somebody suddenly makes a scene funnier or sadder simply by the way they stand in it. It is also a process that has to acknowledge the precarious realities many performers are living through. People are juggling visa applications, housing insecurity, refugee claims, physically exhausting jobs… It is difficult to focus on memorising lines when basic stability is uncertain. This isn’t The Flowers of Srebrenica, our Offie-nominated production we toured last year, which was very slick and rehearsed to precision. In Ali, every scene can potentially go completely wrong. Which is precisely why comedy, especially physical comedy, becomes essential. It gives performers freedom, flexibility and confidence
4) You’ve said the show may not be polished but feels “deeply alive”—what does that kind of authenticity bring to the audience experience?
I should clarify that I still enjoy polish. Rigorous is one of my most favourite words. But sometimes contemporary theatre can feel technically immaculate and spiritually dead. What I love about this cast is that there is risk, which creates a kind of alertness. The audience senses they are watching something genuinely happening in front of them rather than being delivered a finished product in quotation marks. There’s a rawness, but also a generosity. People are really there with each other. And because many performers have genuinely experienced displacement, bureaucracy or cultural confusion, there are moments the audience recognises as emotionally true even when the show is at its most ridiculous.
5) How has Ali in Wonder(Eng)land evolved since its original staging in 2022, and what new perspectives have emerged in 2026?
The original show in 2022 was small. We were smaller as a company, we had fewer resources. But also we had a bit more optimism as a country. In 2026, the world has changed and frankly become darker. Stranger. Migration debates have become harsher, public rhetoric more polarised, and political discourse increasingly theatrical in the worst possible sense. The company has changed too. We now have participants from different migration routes, different generations, different political realities. There are people displaced by war, by economics, by family breakdown, by systems collapsing elsewhere. That broadens the conversation. What has emerged more strongly this time is a sense of exhaustion, but also resistance. The show asks: how do you remain human in systems that constantly ask you to prove your humanity?
6) The production reimagines a familiar classic through the lens of migration; what does that transformation reveal about contemporary Britain?
That there was always a political class invested in asserting power and using lies, absurd regulations and nastiness masked as politeness to maintain it. Alice in Wonderland is fundamentally about entering a world where the rules make no sense, language constantly shifts, authority is irrational, and everybody expects you to understand codes nobody explains. For migrants, that can feel oddly familiar. But I don’t think the show is anti-British. I’ve lived here for twenty-seven years; Britain is my home. What interests me are contradictions. This country is capable of extraordinary generosity and extraordinary hostility, often at the same time. A country that celebrates diversity while becoming anxious about difference. A country that depends on migrants while arguing endlessly about whether they belong. But it is significant that at the end, Ali still decides to stay. And takes Peter, their only friend, to start a new life on the other side of the door.