Polly Findlay’s production of Treasure Island is astonishing, if not yet quite quick, clear or sufficiently frightening. Strange comic turns – what is that Welshwoman with a beard and a hen doing there? – blotch it. Yet it contains some really remarkable things. Bryony Lavery’s sharply written adaptation makes Jim Hawkins a Jemima – “girls need adventures too, Mrs Hawkins” – and lights up the ambiguous centre of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story. Who remembers being beguiled and betrayed as a child? Everyone will who sees Arthur Darvill as Long John Silver: he glides and insinuates, but he’s also a magnetic raiser-up. He makes Jim look at the stars.
Lizzie Clachan’s design is a drama of its own. Massive curved ribs enclose the action: we’re looking at a ship but also at the inside of someone’s body; into their heart, you feel. As the mighty deck is winched up, a beehive of cabins appear beneath; later the same space becomes a huge dripping cathedral of underground caves. A glugging, sucking sandscape allows Joshua James’s extraordinarily lissome Ben Gunn to look as if he was being birthed by a mudpat.
James, who argues with himself as if he were on a Tourette’s chat show, is one of the original features of the production. Tim Samuels’s doleful Grey – a pirate so colourless that no one ever recognises him – is another. Still, the absolute marvel is Patsy Ferran as Jim: “Be you boy or be you girl?” “That be my business.”
I’m not surprised she is proving herself mighty; I am only pleased she has managed it so quickly. Ferran made her stage debut as a scene-stealing comic maid in Blithe Spirit only in the spring. This autumn she was extraordinarily subtle – melancholy and obsessive – in James Graham’s The Angry Brigade at Plymouth. She brings these qualities to Treasure Island, where her mixture of wistfulness and sprightliness and her light-as-a-feather movement makes her sometimes look like a tiny Charlie Chaplin. Wit comes not only out of her mouth but of her elbow. She is one of the best young actors I have seen in the past decade.
