”Kidnapped” at Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh and on tour – review

Isobel McArthur’s girl-power rewrite of Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) was one of the glittering highlights of Scottish theatre in the last few years. It did two runs at the Edinburgh Lyceum and swept all before it when it toured, so I came to her take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped with very high expectations. Maybe that set my bar unfairly high, however, because while the piece is a lot of fun, it’s more of a melange that doesn’t quite work.

This production for the National Theatre of Scotland sees McArthur both writing (with Michael John McCarthy) and directing (with Gareth Nicholls), and her high-energy hallmarks are all over the show. Not for this team a straight retelling of the story: instead, the writers take inspiration from the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, Frances, who wrote the original preface to the 1886 novel, and the script weaves her story into the unfolding narrative of the novel. It becomes a multi-layered telling of several stories: the original adventure story, the biography of Frances Stevenson, and the unfolding relationship between the two leads which here becomes an openly gay love story.

Most of the script wanders pretty far from Stevenson’s original, often very successfully. The dialogue is full of wit and there are some very funny send-ups, such as the opening take on life in the Scottish Borders. More often the settings are cranked up to something between bizarre and grotesque, most enjoyably with the zen clan chief of Act II, and it’s accompanied with an enormously fun soundtrack of ‘80s hits. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” sung in Gaelic.

But these multiple layers also bring problems, most seriously with the tone. What begins as a zany romp becomes almost cloyingly sincere in the second act as the love story develops. The final scenes of parting are meant to be so poignant as to tug the heartstrings, but they’re insufficiently prepared for, and aren’t successfully distanced from the madcap action that has gone before. Consequently, they fall a little flat, and even feel a little out of place.

Nor does the action rollick as tightly as it could. Some flabby scenes outstay their welcome, most notably the Act I pirates who could have been ditched long before they were, and there are some scenes that don’t seem to understand their own function. The Jacobite Cluny’s Cave becomes a nightclub casino for no reason beyond a spurious plot point, and Act II begins with a strikingly beautiful but dramatically expendable undersea scene that could happily have been binned.

The two leads are strong, even if they don’t transcend the limitations of the writing. Ryan J Mackay enjoys playing Davie as a slightly useless nerd, and he’s well contrasted with Malcolm Cumming’s ultra-charismatic Alan. Kim Ismay plays Stevenson’s wife with dry charm, though she isn’t given enough to do. The rest of the ensemble are mostly cast from strength – most notably David Rankine’s camp pirate – and Grant O’Rourke plays the authority figures with a mix of authority and satire.

Ultimately what kept me watching was sheer curiosity about what was coming next. The central idea is compelling, the jokes rattle along, and you never know how a scene is going to unfold. It’s a shame it doesn’t have more focus, though, because while it’s fun in places, it doesn’t quite cohere as a whole.