Treasure Island review

Just a few yards down from the Bristol Old Vic on King Street sits the Llandoger Trow, the 17th-century pub that purportedly inspired the Admiral Benbow inn in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Seafaring adventures are in the building’s very brickwork – it’s also where, a century and a half earlier, Daniel Defoe got the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.

Taking advantage of the theatre’s location, Jake Brunger (book and lyrics) and Pippa Cleary (music and lyrics) initially set their new musical adaptation in a 2025 Bristol pub that very much resembles the modern Trow in Tom Rogers’ design, at an open-mic storytelling festival. The framing device makes sense – in a story of Bristolian pirate ghosts and dead fathers, the old walls of a candlelit tavern are evocative – but Brunger and Cleary don’t manage to make this folksy atmosphere particularly consequential to the production as a whole.

Thereafter, swashes are buckled in the traditional manner as the pub wall lifts away and sails are raised (Rogers’ towering ship set is spectacular), and we follow a young, gender-swapped Jim Hawkins (a wide-eyed, bright-voiced Adryne Caulder-James) and a band of suspect sailors on their quest to find the infamous Captain Flint’s buried treasure. The production’s biggest feat is to have the whole score played live by the cast of skilled actor-musicians, with a small chamber orchestra’s worth of instruments brandished about by our troupe of sea-legged shanty singers. Orchestrated with fluid panache by director Paul Foster and choreographer Chi-San Howard, it all looks effortless.

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