It was with much trepidation and excitement that we set sail, many years ago, on our adventure of staging Robert Louis Stevenson’s amazing novel - Treasure Island. We began to understand the emotions Jim Hawkins might have felt as he sailed out of Bristol, leaving his mother far behind him for a future unknown.
Staging a novel can be a foolhardy mission to attempt for any theatre company, particularly a book as famous and renowned as Treasure Island. The theatre experience cannot begin to equal the imaginative joy of reading a novel. How, in two hours to tell the story that takes the reader weeks to accomplish? And anyway, why bother? Just read the book! So that’s what we did, we read the book and we realised we didn’t know Stevenson’s fantastic story as well as we thought we did. We were familiar with the story through the various film versions (our favourite was the Muppet’s Treasure Island) and became aware that very few people nowadays have actually read the novel.
So there was our first solution to staging Treasure Island, for us not to pretend it was anything other than a book. Not a play, not a film, a book! Our on-stage characters, Andy and Iain, would act out the book. We decided to put our two characters into a ‘frame story’, a kind of situation comedy, two people stranded somewhere with only the book for company. Our first thought was to put our on-stage characters on a desert island, but thankfully our designer Shona Reppe had a much better idea and stranded us on a raft in the middle of an ocean. That unlocked the show for us. We would be two musicians (or one musician and a drummer) shipwrecked from a sunken cruise liner, adrift on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic with only bananas and champagne for nourishment, a double-bass, a ukulele and a copy of Treasure Island.
If you saw the show then read the book, you may have noticed a few differences. Firstly we had to reduce the amount of characters in the novel to a practical amount that the two of us could portray, a total of twelve. We then realised that our version would consist of a series of double acts; Jim and Billy Bones, Silver and Jim, Israel and Dick etc. This however hit a snag with the organisers of the voyage; the Squire, Dr Livesey and Captain Smollett – a trio. So we solved that problem by handing the doctor the black spot!
Perhaps the biggest change we made to the novel was simplifying the ‘back-story’ of Captain Flint and Ben Gunn. In the novel, Ben is on the ship, not on the island as Flint takes six men ashore to bury the treasure and then witnesses Flint rowing back alone having murdered the six unfortunates. Ben then returns after Flint’s death, three years later, in another ship to search for the treasure. But his obsession causes him to be marooned on the island until the arrival of the Hispaniola. We simplified this by making Ben one of the six men Flint took to the island who, having witnessed the other five being killed, escapes and hides in a cave.
We hope you enjoyed our version of Stevenson’s classic tale. Even more, we hope it inspired you to read the novel. We re-read the book every time we restage the production and every time we read Treasure Island we discover something new, something we missed the first time around. Lucky you, you’ve still got that to look forward to!
Iain Johnstone & Andy Cannon
2010
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