✭✭✩✩✩

by Nicolas Billon, directed by Mitchell Cushman

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Toronto

June 3-October 22, 2017

“A Dead Man’s Chest”

Last year the Stratford Festival had a huge success in its yearly offering of family-oriented theatre with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by Adrian Mitchell adapted from the children’s novel by C.S. Lewis directed by Tim Carroll.  Here was an intelligent, exciting text to please both adults and children given a visually stunning production.  This year’s family show, Treasure Island by Nicolas Billon adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel directed by Mitchell Cushman is not nearly as good.  The primary flaw lies in Billon’s adaptation that can’t decide whether it is a serious stage adaptation of the story or a send-up. 

The last time the Festival presented the story was in 1991 in an adaptation by Elliott Hayes directed by David William and it was deadly dull.  The difficulty with that adaptation as with the current one is that they do not overcome the inherent problems of an adventure narrative.  Such narratives may be exciting on the page but they are by nature episodic and lack the dramatic conflict so necessary to a gripping theatrical experience. 

Billon attempts to give the story some shape by adding a framing device which finds Juan Chioran (who laters plays Long John Silver) as a father reading Stevenson’s novel to his boy James, Thomas Mitchell Barnet (who later plays Jim Hawkins).  The play is imagined as James’s dream about Stevenson’s story.  This idea derives, of course, from J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan where the Darling children’s father later appears as the pirate Captain Hook.

Throughout Act 1 Billon appears to take the story seriously.  James, now transformed into Jim Hawkins and transported back in time to the 18th century, is happily helping out his mother in his late father’s inn.  As in Stevenson, a strange man Billy Bones (Bruce Hunter) comes in and pays Jim to keep a lookout for a one-legged man.  Unexpectedly, a belligerent blind woman Pew (Deidre Gillard-Rowlings) enters and hands Bones the “black spot” meaning he will soon die.  Indeed, soon afterwards Bones has a stroke and dies.

When Jim and the doctor Diana Livesey (Sarah Dodd), the equivalent for David Livesey in the original, inspect Bones’s belonging they discover a map indicating where treasure is buried on an island.  Livesey surmises that this is the treasure of the deceased Captain Flint and with the help of the Squire Trelawney (Randy Hughson) plans a voyage there to retrieve the treasure. 

The gullible Trelawney hires a crew which includes a one-legged man with a parrot on his shoulder who is none other than the infamous Long John Silver (Juan Chioran).  The ship’s captain Smollett (Jim Codrington) does not trust the crew who are all too aware of the ship’s mercenary mission.  Hidden in a barrel, Jim overhears Silver and the crew are planning a mutiny in which they will steal the map and find the treasure themselves.

Act 2 begins with our first glimpse of Ben Gunn (Katelyn McCulloch), male in the original but female here.  Gunn has been marooned on the island for three years and has gone native in a big way.  The most brilliant aspect of the entire show is the idea of casting Gunn as a performer with the circus skill of aerial silks.  McCulloch amazingly is able to hold a conversation while simultaneously performing the athletic climbs, wraps and drops on aerial silks as if they were the lianas one might find in a tropical jungle.

With Act 2 the show’s style changes completely.  With the cavorting Ben Gunn in the background, Jim steps to the front of the stage and asks the audience directly if there is anybody on the island he should know about.  This immediately elicits the typical panto response, “He’s right behind you!”  From this point onwards any pretence of seriously telling Stevenson’s story vanishes.  Deaths which had been portrayed as gruesome in Act 1 now are played for laughs in Act 2.  Long John Silver, whom we were to believe was a cruel villain, is now played like a typically comic Captain Hook.  There is the typical panto chase through the audience and at one point the rather dim-witted pirates get lost and ask if anyone can give them directions.  The children in the audience, all provided with treasure maps before the show, vie with each other to help the pirates out, even though, theoretically, the children should be rooting for the good guys, i.e. Jim, Livesey, Smollett and Trelawney.  The only panto staple that Cushman suppresses is the booing of the villain, Long John Silver, and the pirates. 

One reason for this is that Billon and Cushman are conflicted over what exactly they are trying to do.  While Silver is obviously set up as the villain, especially after he is revealed in all his pirate regalia in the Act 1 finale, Billon also is fixated on turning Silver into a kind of father-figure for Jim.  This is misguided in many ways.  Silver may teach Jim how to tell north from the stars, but he is also a cold-blooded murderer who has no qualms taking Jim hostage.  If this is the dream of James in the frame, the child is in need of urgent psychotherapy  Besides this, you can’t evoke the black-and-white morals of the panto and create complex human drama at the same time.  Act 2 winds up successful neither as panto nor as serious drama.

Thus, the production basically falls apart during Act 2 and an increase in sentiment when we return to the frame only underscores the profound confusion underlying Billon’s adaptation.  Even the panto structure doesn’t hold.  When the pirates encounter a skeleton pointing the way to the treasure, meant to be frightening in the novel, Billon has the pirate Allardyce (Jamie Mac, who up to now has been comically incoherent) take off the skeleton’s head and recite Hamlet’s speech about Yorick.  When a pirate for no apparent reason throws a life-sized inflated pirate toy on stage, we know Cushman has tumbled into the dreaded anything-for-a-joke style directors at Stratford use whenever they think they need to make a play funnier.

As for the performances, it really depends whether a character or a caricature is what Cushman is looking for and that is not always clear.  As Jim, Thomas Mitchell Barnet is least affected by the change in dramatic style.  He is buoyant and likeable throughout and enthusiastically treats the plot as important even when it loses that status in Act 2. 

As Dr. Livesey, Sarah Dodd is the voice of reason throughout the entire show.  No matter how the tone shifts around her, she remains unperturbed and plays Livesey in an effective, forthright manner.  If you had gone to see Treasure Island as a serious adventure play, Dodd remains a touchstone for that point of view, and the humanity and warmth she lends her character is a breath of fresh air in the midst of the production’s confusion.

Jim Codrington as Captain Smollett never breaks character in the more boisterous Act 2 but he is much more stolid a figure than inspiring.  Randy Hughson pulls out his familiar comic old man routine that would have made good foil for Livesey or Smollet if Billon had decided to write a more faithful adaptation with the bumbling Squire Trelawney as the main comic relief.

Juan Chioran, who has acted in both straight plays and pantos, plays Long John Silver according to the tone Cushman and Billon seek.  He is excellent as a suspicious character in Act 1 and excellent in quite a different way with the broader strokes needed for a panto-like Silver.  Chioran has such presence he commands the stage in either mode.  What Chioran does not show is Silver’s complex mixture of charm and danger.  Chioran would be the perfect actor to convey such a combination, but Billon has simply not written it into his play.

Yet, the one performance that will stay longest in people’s minds will be Katelyn McCulloch as a female Ben Gunn.  Audiences may have seen women on aerial silks in Cirque du Soleil performances but to integrate such a figure so fully into a play is quite unusual.  McCulloch not only gives an impressive physical performance on the silks but she makes Gunn into a delightful character who has become so attuned to nature that she misses very little of civilization at all except cheese.

Douglas Paraschuk’s basic set is a foreshortened cross-section of a schooner with a quarterdeck but unplanked so that the ship’s ribs are visible.  This serves well as the inn where Jim works but does not serve well at all as the stockade that features so much in Act 2.  Paraschuk does not hide the shape of the ship enough with his palisade of timbers to make it look like a stockade.  It is very confusing when people at the “stockade” speak of the “ship” as being elsewhere when it seems they are standing right there on the ship.  The best effect is the use of a translucent beaded curtain that covers the entire stage opening and creates the effect of mist when images are projected onto the back wall through it.

When Stratford staged The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it used an adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company that had already won renown in previous productions.  For Treasure Island, the Festival commissioned a new adaptation from Billon.  While one can see the advantages of a Festival-generated adaptation, the danger of is, as with the disastrous Festival-commissioned Hunchback of Notre Dame of 2003, that it may not be very good.  Treasure Island is one of the boy’s adventure novels most often adapted for the stage and the Festival would have done better to have chosen an adaptation that had already proved its mettle such as the one by Bryony Lavery for Britain’s National Theatre in 2014 that featured a female Jim.  Billon’s version tries to make this “boy’s own”story interesting to girls by changing the gender of Dr. Livesey, Blind Pew, Ben Gunn and many of the pirates.  Why not choose an adaptation that goes even farther by making the hero a girl?

Compared to the heights of last year’s family show, Treasure Island is by turns boring, confusing and tacky.  One always hopes that a child’s first exposure to theatre will be well done and impressive.  That is not the case with Treasure Island and parents would do better to look for one of the many full-out rather than half-baked pantos coming in winter.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Juan Chioran (centre) as Long John Silver and Thomas Mitchell Barnet (far right) as Jim Hawkins; Katelyn McCulloch as Ben Gunn and Thomas Mitchell Barnet as Jim Hawkins; Sarah Dodd as Dr. Livesey, Jimmy Blais as Gray, Randy Hughson as Squire Trelawney and Jim Codrington as Captain Smollett.  ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.