Welcome to the epoch of pirates, where Captain Sandy Rogers, played by Jessie Roberts Smith, swashbuckles across the seven seas, Admiral O’ Greed (Luigi Nardone) casts a creepier Regency shadow than King George in Hamilton and trusty sidekick Tom (Dylan Read) steers the wheel of adventure with the power of his writer's mind!
You are also invited into the world of JB Sports in Westgate Shopping Centre, the immersive, strobing undersea world of a jellyfish in a giant Zorbing ball and an amorphous creature in a shapeless tracksuit laced with LED stripes.
Contrasting the shoestring, collapsible crates and puppets aesthetic you may dread as an adult attending children’s theatre, Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) has taken the best of old and new worlds to share a piece of ‘children’s’ theatre that will absorb and delight both young people and adults in search of adventure…
After our Pirate appetite is wetted by opening sequences of buccaneers cavorting, tumbling, breaking, stretching and striking across a fantasy beach, the lights lift on Tom’s real life—as a sales assistant. In using the frustrated dreams of a prose writer as an overarching narrative, the makers of Pirates have leveraged the essential myth of modern Christmas—as a time of wishes granted and dreams coming true.
It takes a beat for the audience to be complicit in the first sequence of ‘team building’ at JB Sports, as the characters demonstrate their 9AM–5PM egos in lunges and acrobatics, paying homage to ‘motivation’ culture. But as Tom is prevented from ditching his notebooks in the bin and the pirates save him from retail reality, we are swept away by each moment.
While the forces of good and evil battle it out and strained workplace relationships play out in the world of the pirates, there is no sense of patronising the young, beady eyes in the audience.
The six-year-old next to me reliably informed me that his favourite person was ‘The girl’—not the female pirate, but the JB Store Manager, Daisy (Kassichana Okene-Jameson), dragged along on Tom’s adventure. This is testament to a broad spectrum of role-models to choose from in this story, which presents non-binary characters and, at one point, flies a rainbow flag from a mast.
Credit goes to the director and dramaturg of the show, Joan Clevillé and Robert Alan Evans, who have concocted sequences that provide grown-up metaphors while serving the story. Lovely physical, ensemble moments are provided by Captain O’ Greed turning the pirates into slave-like dogs. The seadogs are mesmerized into a state of compliance that sees them heavily motion around the floor while Tom (the dog version) tries to jump through Captain O’ Greed’s increasingly high hoop!
A squad of fish moving their luminous fins in balletic formations is a sure highlight, as is the Disney-quality voice-over given to unintelligent zombies who entangle the pirates in compromising piles on the floor. But we are not deprived of a sea shanty or two, lending sentiment and pause for thought to this hearty family show.
In total, the meta-story and clash between heroes and villains will chime with movie audiences used to the ‘fictional character is dropped in real world’ trope. Scottish Dance Theatre has further, cleverly employed bursts of pop culture from club beats and entrancing lighting from Emma Jones to breaking and barn-dancing in a festive offering that should have children, families and adults in search of adventure suspending their disbelief.