By Charles Hubbard, Second Year Theatre & Performance
The Bristol Old Vic’s Christmas show is a new musical from Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary, who bring equal parts cheekiness and sincerity to a production that swings tonally like a ship in a thunderstorm.
It’s quite strange to go to the Bristol Old Vic and see a show pitched squarely at the family audience. The theatre company, which is as integral to the city of Bristol as Wills Memorial or any given Banksy, is predominantly known for high-minded intellectual output pitched squarely at uni students who need to drop an example of a movement-based sequence in their next essay. Even when they do try their hand at texts with built-in name recognition, such as Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, it’s with a general self-seriousness that what they’re doing is important and not to be walked into lightly. And yet here comes Treasure Island - a new show so guileless, so silly and so desperate to please its audience that it’s probably the closest the Old Vic will ever come to putting on a pantomime. And yet they still find some time to do a drive-by on the Bristol Hippodrome. However, be it moments of dazzling choreography, bizarre tonal shifts or the welcome decision to have the actors play their own instruments onstage, there’s still a very clear undertone of disarming weirdness here. It’s as if the Old Vic’s artistic director Nancy Medina is so determined to challenge audiences that not even a mass-appeal, four-quadrant Christmas show like this one can escape her grasp without having a certain baffling sensibility forcibly injected into it.
The script plays pretty fast and loose with Stevenson’s foundational novel so it feels necessary to give a brief plot description, even if we’re all pretty much familiar with the basics of the book by now. Adryne Caulder-James plays a gender-swapped (though not by name) Jim Hawkins, a 13-year-old girl who is tasked with protecting a miniature treasure chest, only to find its owner slaughtered, the chest missing and the only remnants left a map of how to find it. Despite the urges of her long-suffering mother (Jayde Adams), she goes on a classic heroes’ journey to find the lost treasure with the help of Squire Trelawney (Morgan Val Baker), Captain Smollett (Lloyd Gorman) and the not-to-be-trusted Long John Silver (Colin Leggo). Considering very little actually happens (the titular island is reached the moment the second act begins), the show surges forward with a manic gleefulness that either swept me up along with it or left me completely puzzled, largely depending on which performer was leading the surge.
‘Comedian Jayde Adams [...] starts the evening off with some light crowd work, which is either going to make you cackle or want to crawl under your seat’
First off, Caulder-James is absolutely sensational in the lead role. Her dynamism and temperament match the tone and energy of the show best of all the cast and it’s one of the very few examples of an adult actor playing a child that didn’t completely set my teeth on edge. What a star! Comedian Jayde Adams (winner of the 2014 Funny Women Award) is comparatively a decidedly mixed bag. She starts the evening off with some light crowd work, which is either going to make you cackle or want to crawl under your seat, again depending on how allergic you are to audience participation. Unfortunately, her performance as Jim’s mother is painfully inert and tiresome, meaning that it takes the show until she’s out of the picture to really get going. In Adams’ defense, the role as written is completely thankless and cliched but it would have been nice to see her bona fides as a standup add a touch of humour to the role.
However, this all changes when she (spoilers) returns in the second half as Ben Gunn, a marooned pirate who has long lost her marbles and started talking to coconuts. Her witty asides and incredible expressiveness are possibly the largest contributing factor to why the second half is far superior to the first. So if you end up being disappointed by the first half (like I was) and feeling like leaving at the interval, don’t! The best stuff is yet to come! My personal MVP might have to be Christina Tedders as Hands, one of the crew mates. It’s a deceptively difficult performance with Tedders having to balance having a violin in her hands for almost the entire show and being assistant musical director to the production. She’s also the only member of the cast to give the pirates a tangible sense of menace, which is commendable, even if it makes you sometimes question who the target audience is.
The script is heavy on comic references to Bristol and its history, which are fun in the short term but start to feel a little lazy after a while, especially when you notice that they are the only jokes really getting any laughs. It also makes you wonder what Brunger and Cleary would do if they ever decided to take the show on the road. I doubt audiences in Manchester or Birmingham would have a reaction to the characters constantly joking about how no one wants to live in Clifton. That said, the rest of the below-the-line craft is uniformly excellent. As mentioned earlier, the fight choreography by stage combat titan Katie Waters is peerless and makes you feel like you are watching a true masterpiece whenever the characters pull out their swords.
Amelie Patel
Above all else, I’m interested to see what kind of a response this production gets. A high-profile theatre company producing such a curveball is bound to ruffle some feathers, even if it does produce some new converts. I found it in equal parts enticingly weird and strangely unaffecting. It’s very possible that some of the duller spots here will be refined and bettered throughout the run - they’ve got a month to get it right! However, even in a possible unpolished form, this show is still a very worthwhile experience filled out by undeniably talented performers and some showstopping sequences.
The show runs until 10th January, so there’s still time to see it.
Featured image: Bristol Old Vic / Johan Persson
Will you see Treasure Island at the Bristol Old Vic?
