Treasure Island
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

I relish it when a theatre company has the guts to eviscerate a classic. 

In Warsaw in 1990 I saw a Polish production of Chekhov’s The Seagull that reduced the play to deckchairs, extended pauses and daft symbolism in a witty and absurdist act of cultural vandalism. It was a brilliant East European engagement with things Russian and the deconstruction worked because the audience shared the sense of purpose with which it was done.

What of things Scottish?

The Lyceum has a long pedigree of making shows with actors who play both instruments and caricatures, who sing and seek a direct rapport with the audience. It’s an aesthetic that is halfway between panto and Brecht, and is very adept at whipping up scenes on a bare stage.

Here, we jump from miniature yacht in a heavy North Sea swell, to the giant foresail of the gale-blown Hispaniola, to the submerged fate of a man overboard, and all in the blink of an eye. It’s deft and inventive, and achieved with an exhilarating stagecraft.

Blind Pew, the piratical nemesis, becomes a spidery giant on wheels whose impossibly long arm delivers the black spot to the helpless Billy Bones. Dylan Read brings the manner  of a disconcertingly charming darkest-Leith dope peddlar to the character, in a stunning apparition.

Ben Gunn the castaway, in Tim Dalling’s weirdly inspired characterisation, becomes a bag-lady prankster, an Oz of the scrap heap, both demented and kind-hearted, with the power to strike fear through illusion. Silver’s wooden leg has become a wheelchair from which Amy Conachan’s mutinous ringleader recruits the audience to piracy in song. These are all highly effective moments that feel like inspired inventions. 

But what of the underlying motivation to plunder Stevenson’s classic in this way?

The theme that underlies Treasure Island is the story of an orphaned child who adopts a series of inadequate, violent and treacherous parental surrogates on his road to maturity. This narrative is there to tear your heart, but the heart is neither engaged nor torn in this production. And it’s a shame because the kids in the audience would surely relish a scare.

The gender-blind casting of Jade Chan as Jim Hawkins channels her considerable talents as a singer but seems to strip the character of an emotional vulnerability we can believe in, although her performance is sure to mature in the course of the Christmas run.

Rather, the narrative evades the violence, the jeopardy and the proximity of death that is such a thrilling part of the book. To have a group of “reformed pirates” telling the story as a series of jokes wraps the whole in easy moral compromise, and the production doesn’t deconstruct the tale so much as render it as a sanitised and politically correct picture book, albeit told with great panache.

The themes of Treasure Island — of adventure, class division, treachery and greed — are blunted and the production contents itself with whimsy, riding on the coattails of a classic and rather too eager to please.

Runs until January 4 2025. Box office: 0131 248 4848, lyceum.org.uk