In Victorian England, Dodgson is a scholar at Christ Church, Oxford who loves photography, theatre, and spending time with the Dean’s daughters, including Alice, Carol Marsh. The stern Vice Chancellor, Ernest Milton, disapproves of his latest poem written under the pen name Lewis Carroll and even hints that Oxford’s famous bell, Great Tom, should be silenced because its chimes annoy the crowd ahead of the Queen’s visit. On the suggestion of the Vice Chancellor, Alice Liddell and her sisters are kept out when the Queen arrives, a decision that leaves Dodgson feeling guilty for the disappointed girl. To ease her, he discreetly slips one of the Queen of Hearts’ Pamela Brown tarts to Alice, though he cannot summon the courage to share his true opinion of Great Tom with the visiting monarch.
Dodgson then takes the Dean’s daughters on a boat ride and begins to tell a story about a little girl named Alice who sees a White Rabbit with a pocket watch. Curious, Alice follows him down a large rabbit hole, landing in a room filled with doors and a key that opens a tiny door. Using magical objects that appear in the room, she shifts size—growing taller than the room, then shrinking until she can fit through the door—only to cry a storm of tears that becomes a sea around her. She meets a mouse and, upon washing ashore, witnesses animals debating the best way to dry off in a Caucus Race.
The tale continues as Alice encounters the Rabbit again, who mistakes her for his maid and sends her to retrieve a fan and gloves from his house. She drinks from a bottle in the Rabbit’s home and grows so large that she becomes stuck, and the Rabbit calls in his gardener to fix the problem. A subsequent cake made her shrink, and the Rabbit’s crew of gardeners join the chase as the scene shifts to the Queen’s court. In the woods she meets the Ugly Duchess / Dormouse, Joyce Grenfell, and later the trio of the Hatter, March Hare, and the Dormouse, who are part of a chaotic tea party where the Mad Hatter Raymond Bussières performs a wild, time-bending song.
Alice finds herself back in the door room, this time at the bottom of the sea for a Lobster Quadrille, then returns to the croquet lawn where the King and Queen of Hearts preside. The Queen’s gardeners perilously try to hide a mispainted rose bed, painting white roses red to hide their mistake. The Queen, along with her entourage, accuses Alice of theft when the Knave of Hearts steals the Queen’s tarts; the King of Hearts urges restraint, but a trial is demanded. In the courtroom, nonsense is the rule and the Knave of Hearts—Stephen Murray—and the rest of the characters offer bizarre evidence as the charge reads that the Knave stole the tarts, not Alice. The Queen orders Alice’s execution, but the entire scene erupts as a pack of cards swirls around the courtroom.
Awakening aboard the boat, Alice Liddell realizes that Dodgson’s story may have felt real to her—and the White Rabbit stands on the riverbank, as if confirming the tale. With a renewed sense of wonder, Alice follows Dodgson home, believing that the boundary between story and reality has moments of blur, and she returns to her sisters with the memory of an extraordinary adventure that began as a bedtime tale and became something more.
