THE Nuffield theatre’s new season springs into life tonight with a brand new Nuffield Theatre Company production – the magical-realist fantasy White Rabbit.

Written by Southampton playwright and former member of the Nuffield Writers’ Group, Fiona Mackie, White Rabbit asks the question: do things disappear so you forget them, or do you stop remembering them so they disappear?

When a teenage girl meets up with her younger self, she tries to untangle the facts from the fantasies, the broken dreams from faded memories – a shattered wine glass, a party trick, and a name called over and over in the night.

But can she save her parents’ marriage and stop Dad from vanishing faster than Alice’s White Rabbit?

White Rabbit mixes magic with reality to reflect the complex emotions of a family in freefall, taking a refreshing, honest and compassionate look at the plight of an absent father.

Fiona told Scene South: “I have wanted to write this play for a long time – ever since the Fathers 4 Justice campaigners started to get a really high profile.

“I was really interested in it all and started to realise that quite often the focus didn’t seem to be on the child and how a family break-up affected them. I wanted to write something from the child’s perspective to show how the child feels in these situations.”

Directed by Jack McNamara, The Nuffield’s trainee director through the ITV Theatre Director Scheme, White Rabbit runs in the Studio Cafe Bar until Saturday.