Swallows & Amazons - Bristol Old Vic

Swallows and Amazons is Arthur Ransome’s 1920s classic tale of the adventures that four siblings have when they set off for a camping trip in their sailing boat, the Swallow.  In Helen Edmundson’s adaptation, it celebrates the excitement of small things and the ability of childish imaginations to make the everyday fantastical by enrobing minor incidents in the trappings of the stories they’ve read, from Christopher Columbus to Robinson Crusoe.

A wealth of imagination and creativity has been poured into Tom Morris’s production, and to resounding effect.  All the things that are so popular in today’s disbelief-suspending theatre and sometimes don’t quite come off - puppets, the sketchy representation of a greater whole with just a few everyday items, adults playing children - all work perfectly here.  The maiden voyage of the Swallow, represented with some simple boat parts, a couple of blue ribbons and a lot of human ingenuity, is as nautical as the Americas Cup.  And if ever you needed proof of theatre’s ability to carry an audience’s imagination far beyond what’s in front of their eyes, it lies in the fact that you really do believe that Roger Walker (played by Tom Bennett) is a 7 year old boy - even though he has a beard.

This theatrical magic is facilitated by fantastic acting from the ensemble, spanning everything from slapstick comedy to touching snapshots of the occasional agonies that only children suffer.   Meanwhile the music by Neil Hannon (of The Divine Comedy) far exceeds the quality of normal family show ditties, achieving an almost Sondheimian quality at times.

Swallows and Amazons is everything that good theatre should be.  It’s not often you see a venue like the Old Vic simply re-stage the same Christmas show from four years ago, but in this case it makes complete sense: it’s going to be a hard act to better.  And if, like me, you didn’t bother to go last time because it looked like it would be a little dull and pointless … well, we were wrong.  Go this year.