The Stage

Treasure Island

Published Tuesday 18 November 2008 at 12:30 by Mark Shenton

“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest/yo ho ho and a bottle of rum”, a bunch of pirates inevitably sing in a new version of Treasure Island, even though it’s not actually a musical - but it is a bit of a rum do.

The Haymarket’s last short-lived tenant was a stage version of another novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Ken Ludwig’s new adaptation rivals it in the old-fashioned storybook narrative techniques it leadenly employs to animate its layered, convoluted story.

Sean Holmes’ production is also a throwback to an age of melodrama, loud acting and even louder theatrical gunshots, constantly being fired across the bow of its antique theatricality. While we are too early for panto, we are clearly seeing our first turkey of the festive season.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s celebrated story - originally serialised in a children’s magazine in 1881 and subsequently published as a book in 1883 - is re-rendered here with a Shakespearean back story (complete with quotations from the Bard) in which Michael Legge’s pretty-boy (but too mature) Jim Hawkins finds a father figure to replace his own deceased one in his relationship with Keith Allen’s Long John Silver, eagerly but not convincingly played as a cockney with false leather-encased leg.

His famous parrot, meanwhile, is an even more unconvincing mechanical animal, while the perfunctory set (endless bits of rope, rigging and grainy video projections) fails to provide much atmosphere. But then nothing much comes to inject life into this noisy, empty spectacle, although the live onstage band occasionally compensates.