When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island he declared triumphantly that if it wasn’t a winner with boys, then he didn’t know what boys were like. And it was indeed the perfect boys’ book; pirates, a map, treasure, a boy hero, black-hearted villains and gore. Perfect. It was, therefore, with mixed feelings that I sat through the National Theatre’s feminist take on Treasure Island last night.
On the bright side, the set was phenomenal, a cavernous structure like a whale’s ribcage enclosing the action, with the ribs descending like some sort of swamp creature. In fact, Lizzie Clachan’s design – she had great fun with the rising central platform – stole the show.
But reader, did Jim Hawkins have to be a girl, even a perfectly sprightly girl like Patsy Ferran? Did the pirates have to include women, even women with piratical names like Silent Sue, Joan the Goat and Red Ruth? When the squire observes sorrowfully that the events he witnesses cause him to lose faith in ‘English men and women’ it sounded as if Bryony Lavery’s script had been through a machine operated by Lynne Featherstone.
Look, I do, I really do take the point that in Shakespeare’s day, the boys had all the parts, including the girls’ ones.
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