Kidnapped

3 May 2012 in Dance & Drama, Showcase

Eastgate Theatre, Peebles, 18 April 2012, and touring

ON ONE level, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped is a rip-roaring thriller, full of movement and adventure.

SCARCELY has the newly orphaned David Balfour escaped the clutches of his murderous uncle Ebenezer than he’s in the hands of the merciless captain of a slave-trading ship. His dramatic escape from that virtual imprisonment comes at the cost of nearly drowning then falling foul of anti-Jacobite forces in the 18th century Highlands. Rarely has a happy ending been so deserved.

Alan Steele and Peter Callaghan in Kidnapped (photo Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

Alan Steele and Peter Callaghan in Kidnapped (photo Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

On another level, the story is an analysis of Scotland itself. The journey Balfour takes from Edinburgh to Mull then back across the country’s wildest landscapes allows Stevenson to capture a sense of Scotland’s contrasts. This is a nation of tame lowland and rugged Highland; of well-to-do townsfolk and lawless outsiders; of genteel Whig and rebellious Jacobite. It is that rare thing: a state-of-the-nation adventure yarn.

Director Ed Robson captures something of both strands in his stage adaptation for Cumbernauld Theatre. As the swashbuckling drama romps breathlessly from setting to setting courtesy of three high-energy actors, a “why can’t we live together?” message emerges about a nation defined by its diversity.

At its best, the production conveys a keen sense of the novel’s twin purposes. Using the most economical of means, actors Scott Hoatson, Peter Callaghan and Alan Steele are both storytellers and participants in the tale, dragging us after them as they race – sometimes literally – from incident to incident. In the process, they create the vivid litany of characters who populate the book. They drift into the cartoonish, but they get the message across.

What’s disappointing is that Robson appears not to trust his own instincts. Having got the actors to focus on the storytelling, he then saddles them with a series of tricks that only complicate things. It’s partly that their execution isn’t good enough: the puppetry is half-hearted and the multimedia is muddled. And it’s partly that these techniques lack a coherent aesthetic.

If all the ideas had emerged from, for example, a flotsam and jetsam set, then the wooden-plank puppet of cabin boy Ransome would have seemed part of an organic whole. As it is, the puppet is a one-off, just like the one-off newsreader narrator and the one-off cartoon cut-out sword fight. Having introduced rather nice black-and-white scene-setting projections in the first half, Robson switches to landscape photos in the second. Perhaps this surfeit of ideas is supposed to reflect the restless movement of the original, but they come across as inconsistent and fussy.

The result is a production that does some justice to Robert Louis Stevenson, but has more energy than polish.

©  Francis McLachlan, 2012

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