Night has fallen. We walk through a wooded glen. Music and birdsong fill the air. Leaves, lit from beneath by coloured lights, shiver in soft breezes. The end of Jem’s Treasure Island adventure is near.
Behind me a voice speaks softly: “Granny, what’s your favourite bit so far?” I turn slightly to see the speaker. The top of his head almost reaches my shoulder (not a great height). “First, tell me,” Granny responds, “what’s your favourite?” Without hesitation comes the answer: “The Komodo dragon” (a puppet squatting on Ben Gunn’s upturned coracle in front of a bone-covered palisade barring a tree-lined path). “My favourite,” Granny decides, “is the storm.” “What about you, Granddad?” says the boy. “The fights” (cutlasses, sticks and kicks). Around us, small beacons blaze in muddy undergrowth. In front of us, light glistens on the waters of the lake, site of the final scene. The voice pipes up again: “Granny, you know my real favourite?… All of it so far!”
I partly share this youngster’s feelings. My response to the production, though, cannot be so wholehearted as his. The difference in inches between us illustrates the difference in our stock of experiences - the number of comparisons we can make between what we are seeing and what we have seen. I have felt the magic worked when director Joe Sumsion melds a play’s action and this extraordinary setting into a whole (last year’s The Hobbit, for example). Tonight, the effect is intermittent - as when the stone steps leading up to the park’s imposing central memorial transform into a storm-tossed ship, where sail-clutching pirates sway in sync to imaginary gale-force winds.
The problem lies partly with Debbie Oates’s patchy adaptation. This frames RL Stevenson’s 1883 tale with the story of a timorous girl who finds courage and acceptance in the course of a piratical voyage (Jem substitutes for the Jim of the original). Stevenson’s wild adventure is domesticated to a moral fable, animated by some distinctive performances (including Victoria Brazier’s perfidious Captain Molly). As a walk in the park, the Dukes theatre’s annual summer show is never less than an event; this year, though, it is not quite a drama.
