Iona Firouzabadi
posted 9 August 2006

Under the Black Flag is a play about pirates, vengeance, violence, revolution, loss, terrorism, religion, authority, Marxism, Shakespeare, men, women, swash and buckle. Unfortunately such a weighty cargo means this is a ship that never sets sail.

The traffic of our stage is the biography of the fictional Long John Silver (Cal MacAninch), before he lost his leg. A quixotic figure in a picaresque drama, our John is a teller of tall tales, but his life becomes the tallest tale of all. Filled with high seas and low villains, Simon Bent's play brings him face to face with Oliver Cromwell (John Dougall), has him press-ganged into the navy, rescued by pirates, elected captain, converted to Islam and married to a Sultan's daughter (Akiya Henry).

This is new writing but there are many rye references to Shakespearean conventions, with amusingly loquacious death speeches, statements of the obvious - 'I am shot' - and quick quips about arrases and globes. We even get extracts from Hamlet. What is lacking is a sense of why these references are there. As with much of the writing, there's a lot going on but to little effect. This includes confused and spurious allusions to contemporary politics. Piracy is intermittently employed as a thinly veiled metaphor for terrorism and Cromwell fashioned as a paper mask for Bush/Blair, declaiming: 'the pirate wars against all the world and is the enemy of civilisation. We are at war: a war against piracy'. The roundhead army sings a signature song that plunders Gilbert and Sullivan and delivers us the line 'we are the major model of a modern moral army'. Indeed with many fun, Weill-style tunes by Orlando Gough, this is a play that recurrently threatens to turn into a musical.

Roxanna Silbert's production makes use of the Globe as it should, often breaking from the bounds of the stage - characters sing from the gods, run through the groundlings and lurk in the galleries. On two occasions the audience is drawn into the action, doubling as the rabble of Cromwell's republic. But it could have gone further. In a play whose plot trades heavily on vengeance, violence and revolution, we never feel threatened or unsettled by the bunch of bloodthirsty villains in front of us. Instead we are all in on the jokes and shut out from the fear, leaving the production languishing in the doldrums of middle-England pantomime.

While rollicking comedy is the flesh of the play, its skeleton is that of a revenge tragedy - our hero, Long John, and his enemies, are driven by vengeance to acts of violence. The whole could form a layered and complex tragicomedy, but instead what we get is a body at war with itself. While the actors form a spirited and funny ensemble, the narrative ranges across three hours without a distinct course.

There is no sense that John Silver or any of the characters have a psychological life and unlike in Shakespearean tragicomedy there is no voyage towards greater self-knowledge and possible redemption. Under the Black Flag ends blindly and bitterly, but without the power of real tragedy.

Till 12 August 2006