26 Aug 2024
Deborah Heath shivers her timbers at the Roman Theatre Festival…
Shadow Road Productions, founded by writer Emma King-Farlow, specialise in “bringing exciting work of theatre, for all ages and occasions to unusual spaces in a
creative way”. Reading about their company further I was impressed to hear how they are dedicated to charitable work by raising funds, awareness or even taking their theatre directly to people who couldn’t otherwise access it.
Interestingly, ‘Treasure Island’ by Robert Louis Stevenson was originally titled ‘The Sea Cook: a story for boys’. Thankfully this was changed because of course a thrilling action-adventure story like this should be available to everyone. Indeed, the audience age ranged from young children to their grandparents and spanned all genders. It being presented by a group of female performers was the icing on the cake!
Emma King-Farlow’s script hit the ground running by establishing the set up extremely efficiently (within about five minutes) so that we quickly knew the main characters and their objectives for the story. This was important, because the action was squeezed into only 50 minutes.
When you have a young audience, this kind of brevity is a must and the cast need to be able to keep the pace up throughout. The children in the audience seemed interested in the action and were talking about it with gusto as everyone left so a big well done to the actors for engaging them so well.
Scene changes were done by the cast whilst singing a sea shanty. They all had lovely, powerful voices and so my advice for future production of this show it to elevate this by singing in simple harmony or possible in a round. This is easily done for this style of song and can sound hauntingly beautiful.
Acting was of a good standard throughout. Hero, Jim Hawkins, was played with strength by Sarah Robinson. The rest of the cast had a great deal of roles to play between them.
Highlights for me were Victoria Adler’s Doctor Livesey, Amy Floyd’s Long John Silver and Emma King-Farlow’s Captain Smollett.
This was a tight group of performers who clearly had a good personal connection and I was delighted to see an all-female cast smashing a male dominated tale.
Their sword fighting had been well directed and there was in general a real force to their storytelling throughout.
There were so many characters in this adaptation and I must confess to getting slightly confused as to who was being portrayed at a given time. I have seen a lot of similar productions across the country this summer where a small cast of two to four play multiple roles in a classic story.
What seems to work well in this sort of fast-paced situation is where the cast change into their token costumes for each character in front of the audience rather than backstage as happened here. It makes it clearer that they are representing someone else.
The actors had already successfully broken the fourth wall by establishing a retrospective tale and I think it would be worth embracing this further. Otherwise, if there is a strong directorial decision for costume changes happening offstage, perhaps pruning the character list down would be a possibility.
I really liked the ethos of Shadow Road’s production of ‘Treasure Island’ and given that I love seeing theatre in unusual spaces, would be very interested to see future work. They took a well-loved classical story and gave it an engaging new realisation.
If they return to the Roman Theatre Festival next year, please consider buying a ticket, especially if you are a family trying out the festival for the first time.
