Treasure Island is just such an exciting title. It's such an iconic title.
It's one that I think most people have heard of.
It's got such a huge reputation as an adventure story.
It felt like a real privilege to be able to get our hands on,
on telling that in such a big space.
Men, various,
have chosen me to tell you from beginning to end keeping nothing back but its bearings
all the particulars about Treasure Island.
It was a real challenge for Bryony and I to start thinking about how
we might put it on stage.
The novel is vocalised really chiefly through Jim and Long John Silver.
That doesn't quite work in a staged format. So,
Bryony has invented this wonderful set of very, very colourful,
completely individual, fantastically comic creations
that populate the stage.
There are some women pirates.
We looked and discovered there were some terrible dangerous,
murderous women pirates and it seemed silly not to put them in.
Treasure Island was written at a time when the Victorians had decided that women
had never gone to sea, in any capacity.
And so it's a remarkably masculine book,
but women were at sea in significant numbers, and always had been.
There were women pirates and if we were writing this book today,
Stevenson would indeed have some, some high profile,
very aggressive female pirates who would probably be far more dangerous than
Long John Silver.
Stevenson said very explicitly when he published the book that it was a story
that was for boys only and I think that we felt coming to adapt that and to put
it on stage here at the National,
that we wanted to find a way of making it clear that the story was for boys and for girls
And that making Jim a girl felt like a really appropriate gesture in that direction.
I think we stayed loyal to the innate character of Jim that Louis Stevenson
portrays in the book.
One of someone who's young but intelligent,
and apart from the fact that she's a girl in this production is actually
insignificant. We're pushing the idea that it's about adventure.
One thing that Bryony and I have been really keen to do all the way through
actually is to try and not resort to the very all too obvious set of mental
clichés that already exist and you think about Treasure Island and we really
wanted to try and replace that with a sense of something that felt authentic and
dark and difficult and dangerous and the research into how a ship worked was a
really key part.
Our whole set functions like an 18th century ship and the idea is that every
time there is a scene change,
the cast have to haul that new scene into being,
with ropes and with sea shanties.
We've all been very keen to try and preserve the sort of seam of unease and
darkness and physical threat that feels to me and moral ambiguity actually that
seems to me to be such an important part of the book.
Our villains are dangerous and frightening,
and the adventures that Jim has to go through are full of peril and betrayal.
It feels like a story to me that still has a lot of contemporary resonances.
So the way that those individuals are prepared to pursue the goal of money,
with such headlong intensity, ruthlessness,
and lack of apology feels like something that has something to say to the way
that culture operates today.