Girls need adventures too, Mrs Hawkins

Treasure Island

NT Olivier, 23.01.15, with Mum and Dad

 

When I first heard about this, I sent my family an email with the subject heading ‘how about some gender-bent pirates for Christmas?’ and was carefully ignored by all of them because they’re too polite to ask me if I’ve gone mad. Luckily, I was not deterred, and here we are, because what could possibly be better than a pirate story with a female lead performed with all the bells and whistles that the NT are so very, very good at. Not to mention, though I didn’t know to expect him at the time, Arthur Darvill walking like a pirate as Long John Silver.

Regendering Jim Hawkins is an important but casual amendment to Treasure Island; in narrative terms, it doesn’t matter at all that Jim is a girl, but for audiences, the offhand comment ‘girls need adventures too, Mrs Hawkins’ is a pointed one. Early on, one of the pirates greets Jim ‘ahoy there, lad. Lass. Are you a boy or a girl?’ ‘That’s my business,’ says Jim, because she is brilliant. Treasure Island also has a female-led creative team, with adaptor Bryony Lavery, director Polly Findlay and designer Lizzie Clachan. The last sort-of family show I went to at the NT, The Light Princess, made a sound effort to be a feminist fairy tale and was a lot of fun but with some conspicuous missteps. Treasure Island is a feminist adventure story almost without trying.

The adaptation is a thing of beauty. Lavery adopts the off-kilter rhythms of pirate talk, inbuilt superstitions and maritime similes, and nonetheless the plot rockets along at a good pace. There are running jokes about the various crew members: the most successful one is Grey, the supremely forgettable pirate who looks and sounds like an insurance broker. There’s a fairytale, slightly macabre poignancy to the sticky end that the pirates come to. Obviously, baddie Long John Silver is the sort of charismatic villain that everyone is rooting for, so the ending is bittersweet, but the last appearance of Captain Flint the parrot is a witty coda.

The design is glorious. The ever-adaptable Olivier stage is an inn, two stories of below-decks Hispaniola, a creepy island with inflatable mud-pustules, a labyrinthine tunnel system. The wooden ribs surrounding the stage are sturdy edges of the ship in the first half, and waggle like sinister foliage in the second. Dangling lightbulbs all across the ceiling represent the stars and are linked up with neon-blue lines when Silver is educating Jim about navigating by the stars.

There are a few sea shanties on the soundtrack; a wittily timed and fairly spectacular explosion; ominous lights and sound effects in the storm scene. The pirates are comic creations, each with their own distinct personality. Silver is unapologetically nasty, but Darvill is beguiling in his flamboyant pirate costume and the writing is a well-judged mix of bluster and irony.

The NT’s penchant for bells and whistles goes a long way, but it’s not worth much without the writing and acting to back it up. In the case of Treasure Island, the spectacle is glorious but it’s the writing that sells it. And at a zippy two hours with interval, it achieves all this without keeping anyone up too late.

The deed’s creature

The Changeling

Sam Wanamaker, 21.01.14, with Eve and Anna

 

Though it is barely a year old, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is already on its third Jacobean sex tragedy. Some reviewers are already hinting that the space is characterised by its strong women; more cynically, you could match up the programming with the A-level syllabus and see the logic of staging these plays. It has also been pointed out that the shadowy aesthetics of the theatre chime well with the murky atmospheres these plays take place in: corrupt tangles of castle corridors and city streets in Spain and Italy. I’ve not seen The Changeling before (though I have read it, and wrote a little bit about its bloodletting imagery in my MA dissertation) – but there’s a lot that’s familiar here: just like in The Duchess of Malfi and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, an act of sexual transgression leads inexorably to a bloodbath.

The Changeling is a play in two halves: the two plots shadow one another thematically, but until the very last scene they have very little congress with one another. For this reason, the ‘madhouse plot’ is often cut: the Southwark Playhouse production Anna had seen before left it out, but Dromgoole’s production (with characteristic devotion to some sort of vaguely defined authenticity) restores it – and makes, arguably, more of a success of the pitch-black comedy than of the kinky tragedy of the castle plot.

In the castle, Hattie Morahan’s Beatrice-Joanna finds her contracted marriage to nice-but-dim Alonso de Piracquo is standing in the way of her romance with sexy newcomer Alsemero, and recruits one of her father’s servants to get rid of the obstacle. Morahan is compelling; her Beatrice-Joanna is very, very unstable even early on. Her loathing for De Flores is a kind of obsession: her eyes follow him around the stage. Her voice wavers between fragile trebles and exaggerated huskiness. Trystan Gravelle as De Flores is not really mad or unsettling enough to match her, though his murder of Alonso is horrific: there’s a lot of bellowing and aborted attempts to escape and there’s a lot of blood. Goriness is fast becoming part of the SWP house style, too.

Meanwhile, in the local madhouse, the ageing owner has locked up his wife because she’s young and pretty and as such, according to common sense but also the overwhelming tradition of early modern plots, she is almost certainly planning to cuckold him. Sarah MacRae as Isabella is at the very least considering it, as she is introduced by Lollio, who seems to run the place on her husband’s behalf, to not one but two men pretending to be mad in order to get close to her. The scenes in the madhouse are comic, but the setting is grim; no amount of capering can quite defuse how uncomfortable the play’s portrayal of madness is, and the production does little to help with the backdrop of whooping and bellowing patients rattling the bars at the back of the scene.

The tenuous link between the two – Isabella’s suitors are suspected of Alonso’s murder for a brief period until Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores are exposed – is fairly arbitrary, but the plots illuminate one another on a different level. In both, a woman’s potential to transgress sexually is used as a way of controlling her. Lollio and De Flores use their knowledge of Isabella and Beatrice-Joanna to coerce them. In the second half, the loopy ‘virginity test’ and bed trick start to make the castle plot look too camp to be tragedy; the murder of Beatrice-Joanna’s credulous maid Diaphanta is shocking enough that the audience are kept off-balance. Unlike the Duchess of Malfi or Annabella, or even the megalomaniacal Giovanni from ‘Tis Pity, the protagonists of The Changeling are so thoroughly amoral that watching them is horrible and fascinating and unpredictable.

I’m not sure this is quite such a good handling of the play as ‘Tis Pity was: the pacing feels off, sometimes, and apart from Morahan’s Beatrice-Joanna, the players in the castle plot are a little bland – but The Changeling is an exhilaratingly weird play, and well-suited to the SWP’s own inherent strangeness.