Kidnapped

Eastgate Theatre, Peebles

3 stars
 Robert Louis Stevenson probably wasn’t the first to rewrite Scottish history as a Boy’s Own style adventure, and he certainly wasn’t the  last. On the one hand, Kidnapped’s eighteenth century orphan Davie Balfour’s on the run rites of passage over land and sea en route to  reclaiming his stolen birthright is a heroic yarn of discovery and derring-do. On the other, it’s a state of the nation dot-to-dot through  history that throws Davie together with real-life figures in the ferment of some of the most crucial moments that followed the Jacobite  Rising.
 
 Cumbernauld Theatre’s Ed Robson takes advantage of this in his pocket-sized three-person touring production which utilises live and  recorded back-projections, puppets and story-telling techniques in a quick-fire romp through the landscape.
 
If the TV news report is an idea pioneered in Peter Watkins’ seminal  film, Culloden, the projections of puppet gladiators on the battlefield looks straight off YouTube. Some of the more scenic projections that  accompany Scott Hoatson’s Davie galloping through the glens with Peter  Callaghan’s Alan Breck Stewart to Bal Cooke’s rollicking score,  meanwhile, look like airbrushed offcuts from a Visit Scotland ad. At times this resembles something akin to the sort of TV drama that marks a political epoch with a telly blaring out real-life news footage at the edge of the human narrative centre-stage.
 
With Alan Steele doubling up as assorted wicked uncles, sea Captains  and redcoats, beyond al this, Cumbernauld’s Kidnapped cuts to the heart of what matters to both accidental wanderers in very different ways.  While Davie is learning to be a man, like his comrade and adversary, exile has taught him to believe in something  beyond home.
 
The Herald, April 20th 2012
 
 ends