At the Bristol Old Vic, a grown-up actor is playing a child called Titty who is frightfully, frightfully cross about the lack of wind on the lake. But not for long. Cue a song about jolly well cheering up and making the best of it.
“When plans go up in smoke/ don’t sit around and mope”, sensible Susan sings in what morphs into Fred and Ginger-style dance number. Meanwhile two characters, gruff Lake District charcoal burners, announce “being bored is boring” and sing a Louis Armstrong-like doo-da duet. It’s a hoot.
This stage version of the children’s classic Swallows and Amazons has music and lyrics by Neil Hannon, frontman for the band the Divine Comedy, whose first theatre piece this is. Hannon is a diffident, funny, Irish song writer, whose father is a retired Church of Ireland bishop who drives a tractor. He is sufficiently Anglophile to be the first ever pop musician to have produced an album (called The Duckworth Lewis Method) entirely about cricket.
This rather unlikely Christmas show was conceived during the director Tom Morris’s days at the National Theatre (where he co-directed the smash-hit War Horse) when, drawn to the “dramatic whiff” in Hannon’s songs, he asked the eclectic musician to come up with a musical project.
They talked about doing something grim and arty, possibly a version of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. But Hannon one day found himself in a bookshop and had a better idea. “I saw Swallows and Amazons and read it to myself, skipping the boring bits. I don’t know why it struck such a chord but it just seemed to something ready made, well-known and doable,” he says.
Classic though it is, I am not sure how well-known Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons actually is, apart from the title. There is no blockbuster Hollywood film version to boost its profile, as there is with books by J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis. (Mancunian director Claude Watham’s 1974 movie was, despite its cosy charms, far from an international hit.) Yet in his day, children wrote to Ransome in their thousands, demanding more of his gilded world of outdoor adventure. He duly produced 11 other bestsellers, though not all set in the Lake District.
Even Morris was worried by the old-fashioned subject matter of sailing and innocent pirate-playing in Ransome’s lakeland idyll. Lord of the Flies it is certainly not. “I have to say my initial reaction was this would be a very remote world from our own. But what the book is really about is an attitude to children where they are trusted to play and be responsible at the same time. That mixture seemed quite potent and relevant,” he says.
The book is set around Windermere and Coniston, evoking a world of cotton tents, knickerbockers, bunloaf, perch fishing, lemonade posing as grog, squashed fly biscuits and posh children with good grammar.
But it is the sense of total liberty that glares from the pages like sunshine on water. The show features a key song about “duffers”, an anthem to the most famous telegram in children’s literature, when at the beginning of the book the Walker children write to their father – who is away at sea – to ask whether they can sail and camp on the lake’s island.
The message comes back BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN. A sentiment which today would probably have social workers opening a “children at risk” file on Titty, Roger and the rest.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the book is that a man like Ransome should have written it. As revealed in last year’s gripping biography by Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman, Arthur Ransome (1884-1967) was not the tweedy walrus-moustached English patriot he resembled. He was in fact a convinced Communist. He witnessed the Russian Revolution first hand as a journalist for the Daily News.
Eventually “Red Ransome” was recruited by MI6 in Russia under the code name S76 while also possibly working as a double agent for the Soviets. After a life of covering many of the great upheavals of the early century, he ended up, in 1925, on the shores of Windermere living with his second wife, Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s former private secretary.
A shady man writing sunny novels – Ransome belongs in one of Alan Bennett’s various plays about privileged English spies. There is nothing, however, of his past detectable in Swallows and Amazons except a luggage label with Moscow on it and perhaps that telegram, which was a nod to his journalist days. He loved telegraphese and particularly relished a Reuters colleague’s classic: UNCASH UNFED UPFED RESIGN.
Helen Edmundson, the show’s script writer – and the woman behind the National Theatre’s acclaimed adaptation of Coram Boy – is not convinced Ransome was that political. “I think he was more drawn to adventure. The Russian adventure, the building of a new world, the adventure of sailing – it’s all part of the same attraction,” she says.
Like most people working on the show, she was no fan of the book as child. “I read the first two chapters, having saved up my pocket money to buy it and was irritated by all the sailing jargon. When Tom asked me, I reread it and absolutely loved it. I read it aloud to my children and they did, too. The characterisation is so strong, as are the sibling relationships, the whole pecking order.
“Children coming to see this will see themselves as one of the characters. Are you the imaginative one, the dramatic one, the one who gets left out? There are moments of daring and danger, and a baddy, but it’s all couched in a safe, entertaining way.”
Morris, who is the brother of Chris Morris the actor and satirist, is the only member of the creative team who knows anything at all about sailing. He went out as a boy with his father, a keen sailor, and his chief memory is of being sick over the side. The show has jettisoned the lingo of halyards, thwarts and rowlocks. It’s not only the yachting jargon but the also middle-classness of Ransome’s world that has dated the book and which the show is attempting to hose off.
Ironically, had Ransome put in a bit more class consciousness into the novel he’d be on every school syllabus in the land. Perhaps this is the reason the National Theatre never staged this musical? The material is too socially incorrect.
Morris argues that when it was written, it was pure fiction. Nobody in the Twenties, he reckons, let their children run riot on islands when the smallest couldn’t swim. “If there is a political nugget in it for me, it is the pressures we put on our children not to be playful but to be ever more timetabled in what they do. That has real consequences.”
Hannon agrees. “I thrived on boredom as a child. Kids have so much thrown at them they don’t have time to be inventive. They are too busy going to ballet class. There’s a melancholy in the book for what we’ve lost. You can’t go back and let your children do what ever they want. That time has gone.”
The DIY aesthetic of the show is in keeping with the make-believe the book trades in. As Morris puts it: “It’s a developed theatrical version of a child jumping into a cardboard box and saying: 'I’m in a battleship.’ It’s about how children naturally tend to play with the box and not the present.”
In Bristol, it is hoped the show will commend itself to grandparents as a nostalgia outing and to the young DVD generation as Pirates of the Caribbean in the Lake District.
“In London, we did a rough version in the studio and invited in a class of inner city kids to find out what their response was,” Morris recalls. “They watched the show. At the end, I said: 'OK, thanks for coming and is there anything you want to ask the performers?’ They jumped up and virtually mobbed the Amazons. They just wanted to join in. Every child wants to be a pirate. It’s an urge that crosses any class barrier, time barrier, geographical barrier. That’s, I think, the imaginative heart of the thing.”
Swallows and Amazons is at Bristol Old Vic (0117 9877 877) from Dec 1 to Jan 15. More4 will broadcast a documentary on the production on Saturday Dec 11 at 8pm
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