It is the Easter holidays, the youngsters are at home and under your feet, and if you have not gone away on holiday, that means parents are once again tearing their hair out at finding things to do and entertain them until they have the chance of packing them off once more to school.
To this end, Altrincham's premier amateur theatre company, The Garrick, have over the last few years, cannily provided a family-oriented, child-friendly theatrical entertainment for the community. This year, director Joseph Meighan has chosen Bryony Lavery's freely adapted 2014 version of 'Treasure Island'.
However, what at first, on paper, might have looked like a good idea, in practice, this proved not the best choice unfortunately. Lavery's laboured version is not for children. This is a feminist version which makes both Jim and Dr. Livesey female. It also alters some of the characters, most notably by giving Jim a grandmother instead of parents, and some of the other characters have been added (or subtracted) or their fates changed. The biggest problem with Lavery's version though is the language. This is a 20th century freely adapted script, and yet she chose to keep the language archaic and obscure, thus alienating majority of the target audience from the start. Moreover, she was unable to decide what genre she wanted this work to be classified as: a documentary, a thriller, a ghost story, a horror story, an adventure story, a comedy, a pantomime?? And this indecision was sadly mirrored in both Meighan's directing and the characterisations. The end result feeling much more like it belonged to the 1970/80's TV series called 'Play For Today' than anything contemporary and catching.
It is a very large cast, and some of the minor characters become insignificant in this version, and so one wonders why they were ever even included... Red Ruth, Silent Sue, Dick The Dandy etc...., whilst the character of Grey (Graham Simmonds), a role added by Lavery, was excellently placed and his deadpan presentation was a joy.
Heading the cast this evening, half narrating her own story was the very sincere Lauren Brown as Jim Hawkins. A sturdy performance but sadly lacking the charisma to truly engage continuously. Playing opposite her was a very loud Michael Gallagher, obviously relishing being the villain of the piece as Long John Silver. Sadly the difference in these two opposing performance styles clashed rather than married. Other roles were a mixture of rounded characters and quasi-pantomimic caricatures, and when the over-the-top comedy role of Ben Gunn (Euan Tanna-Fenton) finally arrived, it was too late for the audience to laugh, since there had ben little to no comedy before this point.
With stylised sea shanty community singing for the set changes, a colourful parrot puppet for Captain Flint, and a rather rushed denouement, this was a very mixed bag of a production. A good set design and evocative lighting plan certainly hepled, and the cast were all fully committed and gave proficient and unfeigned performances, but the show as a whole failed to both truly cohere and engage.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 4.4.24
No comments:
Post a Comment