Hard-working cast perform amazing show

THIS is an amazing show. While it might be intended for children, there were all ages and everybody looked enthralled. It was fast-paced, dramatic, inventive, and a great story well told.

Ask an eight-year-old the story and you’ll hear that it’s about some children who sail off on an island search, only to find it inhabited already. Go home or make war?

But this worked on so many deeper levels - responsibility, growth, learning by example, supportive parenting, and simply how a life-changing experience can grow out of the freedom to ‘be a duffer’.

The repressed Walker family, John (Richard Holt), Susan (Katie Moore), Tiity (Akiya Henry) and Roger (the heart-stealingly gorgeous Stewart Wright) provide a beautiful counterpoint to the free-spirited Amazon Pirates – Nancy and Peggy Blackett, (Celia Adams and Sophie Waller).

It took a while to warm up – until ‘Bored with being Bored’, and then it just fizzed along. The final scene, where the ‘barbarian’ Captain Flint is made to walk the plank and face ‘death’ by cushion and sponge in a slo-mo recreation of so many Hollywood fight scenes, was wonderfully funny.

The props were made out of household objects – for example, a parrot from a feather duster and secateurs.

It’s the hardest working cast I’ve ever seen, where everybody played instruments - piano, cello, flute, violin and viola and more on top of playing their parts. I loved every second of it and only wished that my two grandchildren had been sitting next to me.

Jane Howard