"Somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate."

Long ago, one odd and lonely night, the otherwise kindly children’s book author Lewis Carroll was overtaken by a strange trance.  His eyes rolled back gruesomely in their sockets, and his hand, as if possessed, scribbled out seemingly random combinations of letters –  slowly, fiendish phrases emerged, forming some kind of dire incantation from the nether depths, written in some forgotten and diabolical language: the dread verses now known as Jabberwocky.

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The poem is nigh incomprehensible to us today.  But tweed-clad and bewhiskered experts on mysterious and secret subjects have managed to eke out some scraps of meaning: it tells the tale of a monster and its slayer, a tale as old as or older than the telling of tales itself, a tale told even amongst our tongueless protozoan ancestors.  It’s the story scrawled on Einstein’s blackboard, the story that spurs atomic flickers, microbial battle-cries, even our sperm’s frantic race to be devoured by the egg; the same story is shrieked from pulpits, murmurs in the minds of maniacs, or whispers from the pages of sinister children’s books somehow meant to comfort us in the night. It’s the story that surges in our youthful muscles on summer days, but it’s also the resolute rhythm of the ticking of the clock, our imminent dwindling, our forlorn forecast: Hast thou slain the Jabberwock? 

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So asks the poem.  So too asks the show you are about to see, an attempt to adapt those ancient and esoteric stanzas for the stage.  Are you haunted by that same question, on odd and lonely nights, yearning for sleep? 

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Here is the answer:

No. Thou hast not.