Swallows And Amazons: a musical with teeth

By Kelly Apter
Published on Sunday 22 January 2012 04:24

A SEVEN-year-old spending a week on a deserted island, with only his pre-teen siblings for guardians, would have today’s social services in uproar. When Arthur Ransome was writing his quintessentially British adventure novel Swallows And Amazons in 1929, however, it seemed perfectly natural.

With their Naval captain father away on his gunboat, and their mother busy with a baby sister, the Walker children – two boys, two girls –spend the last week of their holiday camping on an island. They drink water from the lake, sail rough waters during the middle of the night and climb tall trees and sharp rocks – in short, the kind of things that would have the average 21st-century parent aghast.

Now those exploits have been brought to the stage in a new musical play produced by Bristol Old Vic. For the creative team behind it – writer Helen Edmundson and composer/lyricist Neil Hannon of the band The Divine Comedy – working on the show has given them pause for thought about their own children.

“I must admit I was quite shocked that their mum let them go to the island,” Edmundson says. “I started to think about my own kids and would I let them do that – and the answer was no. But why not? I do think the novel is very salutary in that it reminds us that children are more resourceful than we give them credit for, and they learn through being given the chance to test themselves.”

For Hannon, whose ten-year-old daughter is the reason the show is here at all (he bought the book to read to her and saw its potential for the stage), the importance of freeing up children to use their imagination was at the fore. After all, as he says, we’re no longer living in Ransome’s time.

“There are so many more people now, so many more cars – so many more ways of dying,” says Hannon with his usual dry wit. “But I think another thrust of the show is to do with imagination and play. Using odds and ends to make things, creating a den under the kitchen table that becomes a castle – that sort of mentality.”

This is Hannon’s first foray into theatre. Brought together with Edmundson by the show’s director Tom Morris (the man behind the stage adaptation of War Horse), he set about writing music and lyrics for the show with the same glee and gusto as the characters within it. “People said to me that I should write a musical because I tell stories in my songs,” he says, “and I love doing things where I’m completely out of my depth. But I didn’t want to do anything terribly serious or adult for my first venture into musical theatre. I wanted to do a family-orientated show so I could be sillier in it. Quite a lot of the language I use in the songs is probably not what children would say, but it makes it funny the fact that they are supposedly saying it.”

At 375 pages long, Ransome’s novel is no short read, and Edmundson and Hannon had to decide which aspects of the children’s adventure to keep and which to lose. A prolific songwriter, Hannon produced far more songs than the show could handle, leading to some tough decisions by the show’s director.

“You have to have a thick skin for this lark,” says Hannon, “because with my albums, I can put on whatever I like. With this Tom would say, ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to lose this one because it’s of no use to the plot at all.’ And I was devastated a couple of times, but you have to let it go and move on. There was one song I wrote called Island Life, which I liked too much so I put it on my last album because I knew it wasn’t going to make it into the show.”

Ordinarily, Hannon writes songs surrounded by computers and a plethora of different instruments. For this, he pared it back to just a piano (“Basically I wanted to be Cole Porter,” he says).

Set in 1929, but with a fairly timeless feel to it, the show has a lo-tech approach to storytelling. A cast of 13 actor/singer/musicians use everyday objects and their own physicality to create life on the island. A pair of pliers and a colourful feather duster becomes a parrot; shears and a bin bag are fashioned into a cormorant; a double bass lies on its side to depict a fallen tree; and fingers and hands are clapped and clicked to create the crackling of an open fire.

“Children often sit through the first 20 minutes quite quietly, thinking, I’m not sure if I’m going to like this,” says Edmundson. “They’re so used to things that instantly feed them with lots of images, and now they’re being asked to use their imaginations. You can almost see their minds working as they’re turning it over. But then the show seems to unlock something inside them, and they go with it and get a thrill out of it.”

It’s a sign of how successful the collaboration between the creators has been that the actors slip seamlessly between Edmundson’s words and Hannon’s lyrics. Both writers respected Ransome’s original text but put their own stamp on it.

“We did share a sense of humour,” says Hannon. “Helen’s words are so playful and witty and I really fed off it. I love the fact that she also took a few of the lines from songs I’d written that had to be discarded, and put them in the dialogue. So that made me slightly less sad about the song disappearing.” «

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Stockpicker

Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 02:47 PM

The children's mother in the book wasn't sure whether she should let them go either. So she sent a telegram to their father, who responded "Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown".

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