Two men on tricycles rode towards each other and started fighting, each of them tumbling off their steeds at intervals, their cycle helmets shiny in flashing stage lights. In the surreal and comic world of the Plantlife production of Alice Through the Looking Glass these were the white and red knights from a chessboard jousting.

In the tale, Alice was lost in a place where figurine knights, kings and queens came alive, sang, danced and fought and a sheep knitted while running a shop. Humpy Dumpty sat on a wall (pictured), and Tweedledee and Tweedledum shouted at each other through megaphones, and insects talked and ate mince pies.

Alice Through the Looking Glass is Lewis Carroll's topsy-turvy delve into madness in which language (and pretty much everything else) becomes - what can I say? - jabberwocky. The sheer nonsense of the story was evoked with style and creativity by Plantlife. In their take on the world beyond the looking glass, there were few vibrant colours and not much light. The set was a dark, industrial, urban landscape characterised by scaffolding and the boiler suits and plastic bin liners worn by the actors.

There were many strong performances from the cast. The white knight made great comedy to watch, riding his bicycle with slow exaggerated moments and treating the audience to a ridiculous song and dance. Alice (Victoria Lupton) was consistently well played all the way through and the Red Queen (Lauren Rowles) and the Gnat (Jodie Adams) made excellent eccentric characters.

The production made good use of a variety of music, from quirky clarinet playing (by Tom Mann) to modern dance music, with impressive dance choreography to match.

Clever techniques were used to illustrate action and feelings. To evoke tears they poured water from bucket to bucket. To show Alice was in a train the wheels were carried and the actors all bumped in time with the imaginary motion. The heads of talking flowers were portrayed by brightly coloured workman's hats.

What let the adaptation down was the length. Every mad scene was fairly long and sometimes slow to play out and this made the production (which was two-and-a-half hours long), at times, rather tedious. Adapter and director Emily Lim would have done better to condense the action into fewer key scenes to reduce the length of the play.