Three boys messing about on a stage – it’s become part of the Edinburgh Fringe tradition, and with the Penny Dreadfuls taking a long and possibly permanent break, and Pappy’s allegedly on their Last. Show. Ever, there’s a gap to be filled. Enter Sleeping Trees with their patchwork version of Treasure Island – indeed, Not Treasure Island.
It’s a great idea, to recreate Treasure Island without rereading it, digging up the buried memories and throwing them together to make a show. The problem I fear is that the concept doesn’t quite translate to the stage, possibly because none of us know the story well enough to distinguish between what actually happened in the story and what is a figment of the collective Sleeping Trees imagination.
That aside, it is all a jolly good romp, with feisty performances from our three lads. It stays fixedly within the sketch comedy format: no props or set, the story driven on by the fast-paced writing, the clownish characters, and the running jokes – in this case, all built round the constant deaths and fake deaths and resurrections of a whole load of old sea dogs, which include a jolly Jimmy Jim Jim, a moribund Jolly Roger, a bevy of hook-bearing Long John Silvers, and various Blind Petes. The humour is old-fashioned and blokish. The audience are mostly teenagers and young adults, and happy to squeal with laughter at the idea of two old pirates snogging, and a loud shout of the word ‘twat’ gets them rolling in the aisles. I much prefer the quaintly boyish touches, for example when we have a small eulogy to jelly, ‘the perfect blend of food and drink, in some ways the only real meal’.
Sleeping Trees are a theatre company emerging from Chichester’s BA Ensemble Theatre course, and are mentored by Bootworks (another three-man team of theatre-makers). They have obviously made a choice to play the sketch-comedy-troupe card, to see how they can make that work for them – and they have certainly proved that they can do that. But I would personally much rather see them playing with form with a little more courage. How, for example, might Not Treasure Island have been if they had taken inspiration from Bootworks’ Predator and put themselves and their relationship to the story into the piece? There are spaces between comedy and theatre to be explored – see for example the work of Total Theatre Award winners Dr Brown, Spymonkey and Will Adamsdale (the latter perhaps the only artist to have won a Fringe First, a Perrier Comedy Award and a Total Theatre Award over two shows); legendary companies such as Peepolykus and The Right Size (aka Hamish McColl and Sean Foley who went on to West End success withThe Play Wot I Wrote); and indeed the wonderful Mighty Boosh, who we should remember started out as an Ed Fringe show directed by Cal McCrystal.
What is obvious from seeing this show is that the Sleeping Trees trio have stage presence, great character skills, a good sense of comic timing, and that they know how to play to and with an audience. So, the question is: what are they going to do with all these skills? The possibilities are endless…