Adventure awaits with Treasure Island
Visually arresting, but not always seaworthy
The adventure begins in the lobby. Any pint-sized theatregoer who attends “Treasure Island” at the Stratford Festival is armed with a treasure map before taking their seats, their tickets taken by ushers in red and blue bandanas tied around their heads.
Some lucky young landlubbers even get to take a peek before the play begins through a special telescope onstage which, according to the program notes, uses virtual reality to transform the theatre into the edge of the sea (not meeting the age requirements, we didn’t get to try this ourselves).
These are interactive elements that director Mitchell Cushman adds to the festival’s annual Schulich Children’s Play, having built his career in Toronto indie theatre with a focus on immersive and site-specific productions (“Terminus” and “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” for example). Pairing Cushman with children’s theatre is a natural move for the festival, since immersion and interaction are paramount for young audiences — especially when the playwright adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure tale is Nicolas Billon, writer of hits like “Iceland” and “Butcher.”
There are moments of surprise and delight in this production, which follows young Jim Hawkins (Thomas Mitchell Barnet), the honourable Dr. Diana Livesey (Sarah Dodd), Captain Smollett (Jim Codrington), Squire Trelawney (a clownish Randy Hughson), the crafty cook Long John Silver (Juan Chioran) and a crew of swarthy swashbucklers who set out to sea in search of the lost treasure of Captain Flint.
First of all, Billon frames the play through the dreams of James (Barnet), whose father (Chioran) reads “Treasure Island” to him (as Cushman’s own father did to him as a child), which leads to a satisfying and moving conclusion.
Visual tricks and gags — toy rowboats travelling along a wire across the stage, a dramatic costume change from the pirates (costume design by Charlotte Dean) and using dodgeballs as cannon balls — get a rise out of the audience. And an especially entertaining move was to cast actor and aerial artist Katelyn McCulloch as the marooned Ben Gunn, who traverses treetops and vines like a more inquisitive, and cheese-obsessed, Tarzan.
However, in cramming the novel into play length while making room for technical elements and audience interaction the plot gets lost at sea.
There’s evidently been much care used in fitting as much of the original story as possible into the play, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel thrown overboard.