By Jonathan Grant

It is the Year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and forty-nine. The King of England has just been executed, beheaded by the “great robber” Cromwell, and the age of the Pirate is here! From the drinking dens of London, stretching out as far and wide as the Barbary Coast and the New World, Under the Black Flag tells the story of Long John Silver, the dastardly villain of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, in the days before he lost his leg and boarded the Hispaniola as a humble but conniving cook.

Staged, aptly, at Shakespeare’s historic Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames, as part of Dominic Dromgoole’s plans to intermingle new dramas with the classics, the audience is taken back through the generations like the retreating tide. And, though he’s writing in the modern day, playwright Simon Bent constructs a language that seems to reel back the hands of time to an age of pocket watches, spyglasses and the Jolly Roger riding high on the Seven Seas.

More than a fantasy-adventure like Stevenson’s Romantic tale of treasure and danger, Under the Black Flag depicts an ordinary man swept along by extraordinary circumstances. John Silver, unfortunate enough to earn the disfavour of the Lord Protector, is press-ganged away from his wife and daughter, for a life in the colonies, where he is later captured by pirates. Yet, this “extra dimension” of familial love, indicative of the literature in our caring, sharing times, is a weighty distraction from the adventure and storytelling that made Stevenson’s version such a classic.

Despite this, Under the Black Flag is a little lightweight in the plot department, making the running time of just over three hours difficult to justify. However, we are treated to many rich characters, such as the colourful Sultan of Morocco (Joseph Marcell), his daughter Sula (Akiya Henry), a sumptuous performer who sparkled in every scene, and the vibrant slave-Hamlet (Mo Sesay), who was expected to act in a rendition of Shakespeare’s tome for the benefit of slave traders. Unfortunately, these all overshadowed the performance of our pirate lead, played by Cal MacAninch, who, though at times masterfully interacted with and excited the audience, lacked the commanding presence on stage that his role demands.

Naturally we expected to learn how he was christened “Long”, and to learn of how he lost a leg, but Under the Black Flag also rewards us with backgrounds on Billy Bones (Paul Rider), whose map started the original treasure hunt, and One-eyed (latterly simply Blind) Pew, played by Trevor Fox. Most disappointingly, though, we don’t learn how the bounty got to Treasure Island, surely a more substantial issue to the prelude of the original pirate novel than being told Long John was once a family man.

An enjoyable and well-oiled production that ran as smoothly as the ships that sailed the Seven Seas beneath the feared skull and crossbones insignia, Under the Black Flag is pure pantomime in the summertime, as it casts off the shackles of the stage boundaries, to interact with the audience. This is a show more for the tourist than the serious theatre-goer, but it is a pleasant night out in wonderful surroundings.

Links: the theatre, with online bookings. Other views: Michael Billington in The Guardian, Charles Spencer in The Telegraph, and Benedict Nightingale in The Times.