Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story of pirates and treasure is not quite the theatrical adventure that it should be in this production by Kenny Ireland. It gets the story from A to B well enough, or rather it gets young, fatherless Jim Hawkins from the remote Admiral Benbow inn in the West Country to the remote desert island where X marks the spot of the treasure buried by the fearsome buccaneer Captain Flint. But it all seems rather tame compared with Pirates of the Caribbean which has rather upped the ante for kids and adults on this kind of swashbuckling.
It looks very handsome, in a clever and useful design by Tim McQuillen-Wright, but both adaptation and production lack an emotional subtext so that the whole thing seems a romp with not very much at stake and there is nothing of the delicious sense of excitement and fear that the pirates should represent.
Treasure Island is a rites-of-passage story about growing up the hard way but, although Antony Eden's Jim is appealing, he is already too old for a boy band let alone to play Jim. Only in the final scene, when the spectre of the dead rise up as the discovery of the treasure is celebrated, do we get any sense of how much this adventure has really cost, and not just in terms of the dead.
Much of the acting is pretty ropey, as if the cast think that they are in panto, and the children simply were not having the lack of a parrot or "pious old" Ben Gunn played by a youngish woman. Unless you have a Long John Silver of real charisma (sorry, but Johnny Depp would have been nice), there is simply no struggle or hard choices for young Jim. It is like having a wolf in Red Riding Hood who is completely devoid of dangerous charm.
· Until April 17. Box office: 024-7655 3055.
