“How little I am touched by the desire for accuracy,” confesses Robert Louis Stevenson in the dedication to his 1886 novel Kidnapped, set in Scotland in the aftermath of the failed Jacobite rebellion around the year 1751. It’s in this same spirit that Isobel McArthur and Michael John McCarthy adapt Stevenson’s story for the stage for the National Theatre of Scotland. The publicity line, “A swashbuckling romcom adventure”, hints at one of the variations they play on Stevenson’s themes, romance not having been a feature of the original – or at least not overtly.
Just as in Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), their previous, highly successful (and much wittier) translation from page to stage, McArthur and McCarthy introduce contemporary pop songs and a framing device that recontextualises the original. A group of female servants told Jane Austen’s story from a below-the-stairs perspective (characterised by boots, frocks and minimal props). Here, the tale is introduced by Frances, Stevenson’s older, previously divorced American wife. Not so much a “tomboy”, as she was called by Stevenson’s disapproving mother, but, in her own words, “a tom-man”, helping her illness-weakened husband to write a tale inspired by her own adventures – also by her having fallen “inconveniently, fatally in love” with him. This love is reflected in the parallel relationship between ingenue and Whig David (“Davie”) Balfour and swashbuckling Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart.
