Skip to main content

Kidnapped

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Four stars

Bromance isn’t dead in this glorious reinvention of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic historical romp, brought to life by the creative team behind the similarly audacious take on Jane Austen in the award winning Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). Director Isobel McArthur and composer Michael John McCarthy’s new creation is subtitled A Swashbuckling Rom-Com Adventure. This is a considerably more concise pointer of things to come than Stevenson’s own sixty-nine word spoiler that accompanied his nineteenth century rites of passage saga concerning young Davie Balfour as he goes on the run with Jacobite rebel Alan Breck Stewart. 

 

Given ambitious main stage legs in this National Theatre of Scotland production, it stays true to Stevenson’s original, even as it moves way beyond the story’s Boys’ Own style adventure to make something much more of the moment.

For starters, the show is introduced by Frances, a tough talking Country singer who also happens to be Stevenson’s wife. With Frances only too willing to give the great man a kick up the bahookie when sickly, slacking or both, without her, it seems, Stevenson simply wouldn’t have got those pesky books written at all. Kim Ismay plays Frances with spurs of steel, driving the action with Grand Ole Opry style renditions of 1980s pop classics, accompanied on Anna Orton’s multi-layered set by the rest of the show’s playful ten-strong ensemble.  

If the shape-throwing pirates in the wilfully silly first half at times recall Horrible Histories by way of Crackerjack, the story’s political background gives things a depth that has us rooting for Davie and Alan. Played respectively by Ryan J MacKay and Malcolm Cumming, the duo’s mix of gallusness and emotional honesty en route to enlightenment sees them become a kind of Caledonian Butch and Sundance.

The result in McArthur’s production, co directed with Gareth Nicholls, is part history lesson, part ripping yarn and part rom-com. Frances’ presence suggests that behind every old school literary himbo is a rootin’ tootin’ chantoosie, and yeehaw to that. It is Davie’s getting of wisdom, however, that suggests Scotland is a bigger country than you think.


The Herald, April 10th 2023

Ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more