Moonfleet – Salisbury Playhouse

Ryan Heenan in Moonfleet at the Salisbury Playhouse. Picture: The Other Richard

Moonfleet continues at the Salisbury Playhouse until 5 May 2018.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

J Meade Falkner’s novel Moonfleet is ripe for the transition from page to stage. If anything, it’s a more rollicking yarn than Treasure Island. Smugglers, contraband, hidden treasure, creepy crypts, storms at sea, shipwrecks, a youthful hero and heroine and the ghost of Blackbeard – it’s got the lot.

It’s also the perfect choice for Salisbury Playhouse and its remit to give a strong voice to new writing from the south west. Written in 1898 by Wiltshire-born Falkner, it’s set largely on the coast of neighbouring county Dorset and this new musical version has book and lyrics by Playhouse artistic director Gareth Machin, who also directs.

Aside from tinkering with the timescale slightly and turning innkeeper Elzevir Block into a feisty female, Machin has stayed faithful to the book for the most part and one has to admire lyrics that rhyme ‘sadder’ with ‘bladder’.

But Russell Hepplewhite’s score feels old-fashioned, the sung-through narrative elements sound too samey and one longs at times for something more like a tub-thumping chorus rather than worthy choral singing, however robust.

That said, the hardworking cast – most of them doubling and trebling roles – sound marvellous under the musical direction of Michael Haslam. Machin’s direction keeps them constantly on the move, swirling through the hazy mist.

The story centres on young orphan John Trenchard (earnestly played by Ryan Heenan), who falls in with smugglers, whose contraband is stored beneath Moonfleet’s church.

Thrown out of the home of his godfearing aunt (Rhona McGregor), he is taken in by the gang’s ringleader, innkeeper Isabelle Block, whose son of the same age was killed by wicked squire and local magistrate Maskew.

John is determined to find a fabled diamond, rumoured to have been stolen from Charles I and hidden by long dead lord of the manor Mohune, otherwise known as Blackbeard and said to haunt the village.

He is joined in his quest by Maskew’s beautiful daughter (an appealing Ruth Betteridge), but all goes horribly wrong on Moonfleet’s beach.

You can’t fault the production values. Handsomely mounted on Tom Rogers’ timbered, multi-level set with its ropes and ladders, kegs, casks and barrels, the raked staging allows for traps doors through which smoke and haze – lots of it – pour throughout the evening.

Tim Lutkin’s atmospheric lighting is dark and shadowy, allowing Ashley Mercer’s deep-voiced Blackbeard to materialise and disappear at will.

Dan Smith’s Hinks and Susannah van den Berg’s Mrs Gadd make the most of their comic gossip numbers, providing welcome humour.

Simon Butteriss has fun trebling the Rev Glennie, the bailiff auctioning the lease of the Why-Not inn and the duplicitous diamond dealer Aldobrand, and there’s strong support from Dom Hartley-Harris as sexton Ratsey.

Earl Carpenter is a stern Maskew and a sleazy Turnkey, but his fine voice and commanding presence seem a little wasted here.

Rebecca Lock is an impassioned Isabelle and the strength of maternal feeling both for her lost son and for the one she seemingly adopts resonates more by playing her as a woman.

Lesley Bates