Treasure Island is on at The Attic Theatre, Stratford until Monday

Treasure Island, The Attic Theatre, until 26th August

Review by Peter Buckroyd. Photos by Fuzfilms

LOOKING for a summer holiday treat for all the family? Look no further. This is it.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel is quite topical with sea journeys, pirates and arbitrary murders. It’s rather a gloomy tale of people looking for buried treasure in a promised land far away across the seas, but Catherine Prout’s playtext turns it into a jolly rollicking comic pantomime, suitable for all ages.

There is a pistol dance, two sword fights, a puppet incarnation of Captain Flint, an extended fantasy ghost mime based on the subject of triangles, atmospheric lighting designed by Kat Murray and an excellent sound plot designed by Elliott Wallis. Jokes of all kinds – anachronistic, verbal, visual, linguistic – pepper the play so that children and adults alike are kept on the edge of their seats in order not to miss anything.

The cast of seven, playing all the parts, is a really strong one. Charming boyish Jim Hawkins is played expressively by Matt Rousseau, a splendid counterpart to Joshua Chandos’s Long John Silver whose rolling eyes and cleverly contrived one leg combines powerful aggression with great facial expressions. Wilson McDowell is a delightfully dopey timorous pirate, Job Anderson, and Megan Kaur a consistently grumpy George Merry. George Ormerod’s Billy Bones is loud, powerful and bombastic whose boundless energy spills over into his Squire Trelawny.