>>PREVIEW
TREASURE ISLAND
Alberta Theatre Projects
Adapted by Michael O’Brien
Directed by Duval Lang
Runs until December 28
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
For young moviegoers in the golden age of Hollywood, the quintessential onscreen pirate was Errol Flynn’s dashing Capt. Blood. For today’s generation, it’ll likely be Johnny Depp’s delightfully dissolute Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. But for baby boomers and older Gen Xers like Paul Cowling and myself, there’s one name that flies high above all others, like a Jolly Roger flapping at the top of the mast.
"Robert Newton," answers Cowling, almost before the word "pirate" is out of my mouth.
Newton, a great British character actor, nailed the role of Long John Silver once and for all in the 1950 Disney film of Treasure Island. Described by film historian Leslie Halliwell as "a ham, but a succulent one," Newton played the devious, one-legged ship’s cook with such gleeful relish that his squinting eye and cries of "Arr, matey!" have become synonymous with the pirate image. And Newton capitalized on the role, repeating it in an Australian-made TV series, The Adventures of Long John Silver (1955), that would live on in reruns and leave a mark on impressionable young minds as indelible as a sailor’s tattoo.
"I remember the movie and the series – it was in black and white," recalls Cowling, 42. "Newton was unbelievable as an actor – he personified Long John Silver."
Nonetheless, a brave Cowling has put that knowledge behind him and sallied forth, parrot on shoulder and cutlass in hand, to give his own portrayal of the great fictional buccaneer in Alberta Theatre Projects’ new version of Treasure Island. And he’s done his best to avoid any undue Newtonian influence.
"I’ve made a point not to look at the movie anymore," he says. "I haven’t seen it since I was a kid and I don’t want to see it now. It’s hard enough to play Long John as it is."
However, Cowling and the rest of the cast and crew of ATP’s show have the advantage of playing to a family audience full of kids who may not even know the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, let alone the Disney film, but are primed for a classic pirate yarn after the phenomenal success of the inaugural Pirates of the Caribbean film. And Stevenson’s 1883 book remains the most famous entry in the genre, with its tale of treasure maps and desert islands, sea voyages and swordfights, and a gang of scurvy cutthroats with names like Billy Bones, Blind Pew, Ben Gunn and Black Dog. It’s such a rattling good adventure that no red-blooded child – or adult – could resist it.
"It’s funny how excited everybody is to do this show," says Cowling. "And I mean everybody – the staff, the people in the office. They all had pirate names on the first day of the (script) reading. Everybody came in and said, ‘Hi, I’m So-and-so and my pirate name is….’"
Cowling himself has clearly caught the pirate fever. At this interview, the tall, handsome actor sports a black T-shirt emblazoned with a white skull and crossbones. But when he says playing Long John Silver is hard work, he’s not joking.
"When you first get the role you say, ‘Cool! I’ve always wanted to play Long John Silver, I can hardly wait,’" he says. "Then you get into the reality of it – hopping around on one leg."
While Long John in the novel simply uses a crutch, Cowling and director Duval Lang decided to appropriate a prop, as it were, from standard pirate lore. "We went and got a prosthetic made. It’s a gorgeous peg leg, a wooden leg carved into a mermaid," says Cowling. The false limb is harnessed to Cowling’s left thigh and he has to keep his leg tucked up behind him. "It’s not bad – I can put my weight on (the peg leg) – but since you’ve only got a foot about the size of a coaster to step on, you have to re-learn to walk," he says. The device also limits his participation in the more vigorous action sequences. "When we were in rehearsal, we’d be saying, ‘Boy, it would be really cool if Long John could…’ and then realize, no, it’s probably not going to be possible."
The role presents other challenges, too. We don’t generally think of fictional pirates as complex characters, but Stevenson was a great writer and Long John Silver is one of his greatest creations, endowed with a remarkably multifaceted personality of a kind you don’t expect to encounter in a 19th-century adventure story for children. A lively sea cook with a secret pirate past, hired to ship out with young Jim Hawkins and his adult friends in search of buried gold, Silver’s motives and true feelings remain intriguingly elusive. Cowling says ATP’s Treasure Island gives him his due.
"We’ve got the book to rely on and a great adaptation, so he’s very three-dimensional. There are points in the play where he’s a father figure to Jim Hawkins, and other points where he’s exactly the opposite and wants Jim dead. He plays so many angles at once. It gives him a real life of his own. He’s larger than life – most pirates are – but he’s not a cartoon."
ATP is using a 1997 adaptation by Michael O’Brien, a Canadian playwright who specializes in dramatizing literary classics – the company did his Oliver Twist (also featuring Cowling) several seasons ago. While O’Brien sticks close to the original, he also adds a few touches of his own, including a female pirate à la Anne Bonny, played here by Valerie Planche. She and Cheryl Faye Olson, cast as a cabin boy, are the lone women in an otherwise all-male company.
It’s good to have them onboard, says Cowling. "However," he adds with a laugh, "I think we’ve corrupted them into men. There’s a lot of testosterone onstage. It’s kinda hard to avoid."
In fact, it seems like almost every able-bodied male actor in town has been recruited for the play, with a Calgary all-star cast that includes such old salts as Christopher Hunt, Andy Curtis, David LeReaney, Jim Leyden and Doug McKeag, as well as young swabs like Ryan Luhning, Jonathan Lewis, Tyrell Crews and Phil Fulton as Jim Hawkins. Lang, artistic director of Quest Theatre, is staging the show in association with his young people’s company.
Cowling says Lang is directing the show Quest-style, leaving lots to the audience’s imagination, but there are also some impressive set pieces, chief among them a version of the ship Hispaniola conceived by set designer Scott Reid.
"It’s quite fantastic. It moves, goes back and forth, and it has a little jolly boat," says Cowling. "I should also mention we have a mechanical parrot. It moves and speaks at certain points. But we’ve discovered that if the batteries are low it gets a little (weird) on us. If you set it down, it’ll start to twitch. It’s creepy, actually. But you can’t have Long John without a parrot."
Treasure Island is Cowling’s first appearance at ATP since starring in The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum in 2000 and is a bit of a homecoming show for him. The Calgary actor spent the last three years living in Edmonton and working for companies like the Citadel, the Mayfield dinner theatre and Shadow. It was at the latter that he met his wife Heather, sister of John Hudson, the company’s artistic director. They were married this past summer and have relocated to Calgary.
Cowling, whose other ATP credits include Assassins and The Stone Angel, says the company is his favourite place to work – even if it always puts him to the test. "It’s funny, whenever I come to ATP it turns out to be the most challenging theatre I do," he says. "When I did Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, I had three weeks to learn how to play the bagpipes. Now here I am, back again, and they’ve got me hopping around on one leg."
Other famous fictional pirates
Aar, matey, here be other great bloodthirsty buccaneers of play, film and novel:
· Capt. Blood – hero of Rafael Sabatini’s romantic novel, this high-seas Robin Hood was most memorably incarnated by the rakish young Errol Flynn in the 1935 film directed by the legendary Michael Curtiz (Casablanca). It made Flynn – an unknown Hollywood bit player from Tasmania – into a star.
· Capt. Hook – dastardly arch-enemy of Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s play and novel, he acquired his nasty, pointy prosthetic after losing his hand to a crocodile. An upper-class dandy and English public school alumnus, he was voiced by Hans Conried in the classic 1953 Disney cartoon and embodied by Dustin Hoffman in Steven Spielberg’s silly 1991 "sequel," Hook.
· The Pirate King – the most musical of cutthroats, he led The Pirates of Penzance in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta, the duo’s timeless contribution to the fin de siècle pirate vogue. He was played with swashbuckling brio by Kevin Kline in a 1983 film version that also featured pop stars of the period Linda Ronstadt and Rex Smith (remember him?).
· Capt. Jack Sparrow – Johnny Depp stole the show, lock, stock and barrel, as this slightly sozzled, thoroughly disarming scallywag in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean. Depp famously modelled the character on Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, but he wasn’t the first to make a pirates-rockers correlation – Keith Moon, wildman drummer for The Who, was a fan of Robert "Long John Silver" Newton and shared both a physical resemblance to the actor as well as his love for the bottle. |
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