Arts:Blog

Theatre Review: Treasure Island (Royal Lyceum, 2024)

Anna Burnside reviews ‘a delightful, if gentle, festive night out.’

At the Admiral Benbow Home for Retired Pirates, the inmates are getting restless. Weary of tea and basket weaving, they demand swashbuckling adventures—which is a clever framing device for Duncan McLean’s reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson’s high seas adventure, here relocated to Orkney for no immediately apparent reason.

While this version keeps most of the key elements of the original, the peril and drama are washed up around Scapa Flow. Lean Jean Silver (Amy Conachan), transported from her Leith pie shop to a pirate ship, lacks menace. Itaxso Moreno’s Billy Bones has swagger but no threat. Jim - an earnest Jade Chan in a fair isle sweater - is a sweet kid but fails to win the audience’s hearts.

On a micro level the script works well, with excellent chat and thoughtful humour. But where this production really wins is with the sensory elements. It looks and sounds gorgeous, a masterclass in transforming a Victorian theatre with the power of imagination.

The bare boards, trap doors, ropes and ladders of backstage become the inn, the ship, the island and even the retirement home. At one point Jim hides in a plastic laundry bag, at another paddles furiously on a tea trolley. None of these devices is new, but they are used here to great effect.

There are wonderful set pieces - an Ivor Cutleresque song, a tremendous cameo from the blind beggar Pew, here clinging to a giant A-frame with massive, etiolated limbs. The parrot of the original becomes a puffin, smartly operated by Dylan Read.

Under Wils Wilson’s direction, these are enough to overcome the shortfalls in the script and make this a delightful, if gentle, festive night out.

Treasure Island performs at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh until January 4, 2025. For further details, go to their website.

Photo by Jess Shurte.