BRISTOL’s historic Old Vic breaks with its usual non-celebrity tradition this year, bringing in local star, comedian, actor and singer Jayde Adams to lead a terrific cast of actor-musicians in a musical retelling of a story that started its life at the Llandoger Trow, just yards down the street.

It’s 15 years since King Street was closed for a summer open-air production of Treasure Island, and there is a real buzz as Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal tale of pirate gold and treasure maps returns to the theatre.

The evening opens at a pub storytelling contest, where Cornish comedian Colin Leggo is chosen by MC Jayde to get the ball rolling. And the next thing you know, Tom Rogers’ brilliantly designed set becomes the Admiral Benbow Inn, the good ship Hispaniola and a tropical island … and the tale unfolds, with our bearded story-teller reappearing as the iconic villain (with a heart of somewhat-tarnished gold) Long John Silver.

With rollicking songs from Pippa Cleary and Jake Brunger, the audience is swept into the adventure, in which the bloodthirsty pirates try to beat Squire Trelawney and Dr Livesey to the hidden treasure, and the abandoned Ben Gunn sets the record straight, with the help of some singing coconuts.

 

Recent graduate Adryne Caulder-James is the delightfully determined teenaged Jim Hawkins, with Jayde (in her first professional acting role, on the stage where she first trod the boards) as her mother – and Ben Gunn, and a parrot – at the same time as producing some astonishing singing to raise the roof and rumble the foundations!

This Treasure Island is packed full of fun and laughter, as well as peril and disappointed loyalty with a few light asides about poverty and intrinsic goodness and hope. It’s on until 10th January, well worth the journey to the very prettily decorated King Street.

GP-W

 

Treasure Island photographs by Johan Persson