Diary of a Shopkeeper, 21st April 2024

Robert Louis Stevenson and his father on Graemsay.

Merry Christmas one and all! Sorry, didn’t mean to shock you. You haven’t fallen asleep for eight months and woken up on Christmas Day. It’s just me who’s been time-time travelling: forward to pantomime season, and back to Victorian Scotland.

I’ve been asked to write this year’s Christmas show for the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, and have decided to adapt Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It’s a gripping story with a host of entertaining characters, and lots of scope for theatrical pizzazz. Best of all, it’s been a classic for so long, and adapted so many times for stage, TV and film, that I can’t ruin it. There’s no need for me to treat it too reverently, and bold choices can be made about action and setting, without detracting from the spirit of the original. So, for instance, instead of the good ship Hispaniola sailing from Devon to the Caribbean in search of Captain Flint’s buried treasure, in my version they sail from Leith to Orkney. And instead of a talking parrot there’s a talking puffin.

In making this change of location, I was inspired by Stevenson’s visit to Orkney as an 18-year-old. His family was a pioneering and highly successful firm of engineers, specialising in nautical construction: piers, harbours and above all lighthouses. Almost all the lighthouses in Orkney were designed and built by them. For their summer holidays, the Stevenson parents and children would board a sailing ship in Leith and visit the sites of their current projects. Young RLS had no interest in engineering, but he did enjoy life under sail, and he loved hearing dramatic sea stories. Visiting Fair Isle, for instance, and seeing the geo where a Spanish Armada vessel had been wrecked, he wrote, ‘strange to think of the great old ship, with its gilded castle of a stern, its scroll-work and its emblazoning, and a Duke of Spain on board, beating her brains out on the iron bound coast.’

These long journeys around the northern and western isles gave Stevenson a love of sailing – and of islands – that never left him. He may have disappointed his family by showing no interest in engineering as a career, but he honoured their heritage by writing some of the most exciting sea stories in the language. And none more exciting than Treasure Island.

Surprisingly, there’s a lot to excite a wine merchant in the novel. First, the pirates are almost constantly drunk. As soon as they get their hands on a bottle of rum – yo ho ho! – it’s immediately emptied and whatever buccaneering ploy they should be focusing on is forgotten. I can’t help thinking that the pirates would have been much more successful at finding the treasure if they’d only followed the Scottish Government’s guidelines for Responsible Drinking.

I also learned that grog was invented to encourage just that. I was vaguely aware of it as an alcoholic drink loved by salty sea dogs. Now I know it was a mixture of one part rum to three parts water – virtually a health drink. I also learned that it was invented by Vice Admiral Edward Vernon on 21st August 1740, and named after the grogram (mohair and gum) coat that he always wore.

And did you know – I didn’t – that when we raise our glasses in a toast, we are commemorating the old practice of placing a piece of spiced toasted bread to flavour wine and ale. All good shoreside taverns offered this on their menu before the days of heated pie cabinets and microwaves.

Is all this painstaking and detailed research reflected in a historically accurate drama about early nineteenth century life at sea? No. The process of research is mostly about finding out loads of interesting stuff which I can’t possibly fit in. And adapting a novel for the stage is mostly about developing a great appreciation and admiration for the scope and complexity of the book – and then having to leave almost all of it out. I only have two hours, and whatever I do has to entertain 800 members of a family audience from age eight upwards. So there’s not much depiction of unwholesome drunken sailors.

What is in it? All the good bits! And which are those? You’ll have to come and see it to find out. Tickets are now on sale on the Lyceum’s website.

Stromness Museum has a fascinating series of exhibits about Orkney’s lighthouses, which includes much information about the Stevensons. The photo at the top of this post is one I snapped in their display. It shows RLS and his father Thomas on their summer tour in 1868, posing outside Hoy Low lighthouse. It’s significant to note that RLS seems more interested in his book than the lighthouse - is his finger not marking the place where he’s been interrupted in his reading?

Tickets for the Lyceum show are available here. Includes exclusive jokes for Orcadian audience members!

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 25th April 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.