With the long-running Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), playwright Isobel McArthur lit upon a winning technique – one as exhilarating as it was counterintuitive. You take a popular if essentially serious novel and treat it with just enough irreverence to make it fun. Lest the gags, playfulness and pop songs overwhelm it, you also invest it with enough affection to keep the story compelling and the emotions true.
What worked for Jane Austen also works for Robert Louis Stevenson. Reunited with composer and co-creator Michael John McCarthy plus co-director Gareth Nicholls, McArthur shakes down the swashbuckling tale of young Davie Balfour, orphaned and all at sea in more ways than one, and makes it equal parts funny, thrilling and romantic.
Her way into this National Theatre of Scotland production is Frances Stevenson, the novelist’s American wife. She suggested the idea of Kidnapped after developing a fascination with the real-life assassination of Colin Campbell, AKA the Red Fox, in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising. Played by Kim Ismay, a striking figure in black mourning dress, she kicks off with Johnny Cash’s I’ve Been Everywhere, wittily rewritten to include local place names, before framing this tale of wanderlust in terms of her own travels and the relationship with her sickly husband.
The focus, though, is rightly on Ryan J Mackay as Davie, long-sleeved and high-trousered, whose accidental entry into the world of pirates and politics turns out to be formative. To a skiffle backing that ranges from a Gaelic Road to Nowhere to a shanty-like Only You, he is both fired up and infuriated by a cavalier Malcolm Cumming as Alan Breck Stewart, the Jacobite renegade. Together, they roam from the high seas to the Highlands, developing a connection that becomes more than fraternal.
They are as plucky and lovable as the rest of the lively ensemble, playing merrily on a set by Anna Orton that looks like it has been thrown together but, as it switches from rocky outcrop to underwater landscape, is precise as well as witty. There is an odd amount of swearing for a show aimed at the over-12s, but more typically it is inventive, colourful and well worth the ride.
