Treasure Island review: David Oyelowo leads handsome adventure with a glint of steel

It feels like it was quite recently, but at the same time about a million years ago, when a show like Treasure Island would have been a Sunday-night event for Britain to enjoy together on BBC One.

These days the new version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s boaty classic unfurls its sails on Mondays on Paramount+, part of a just-expanded, soon-to-be-hegemonic entertainment behemoth – but for subscribers who fire up the relevant app every week, the product they consume here has the right old-school feel. It’s a handsome adventure with a glint of steel.

David Oyelowo leads it – and, since we’re in an era where audiences have to be grabbed immediately, is deftly shoehorned into the narrative right from the start – as Long John Silver, the untrustworthy seafarer who, in Oyelowo’s hands, becomes a force of nature, an antagonist whose presence intimidates his enemies half to death before he needs to draw a pistol or swing his crutch.

Who and what Silver is defines any Treasure Island dramatisation, and the qualities of this one come largely from Oyelowo’s reading of the notorious parrot-balancer, and series creator Robert Murphy’s writing of him: their Long John is a thrillingly impossible antagonist, able to emerge strengthened from the foulest predicament.

But he’s a modern pirate too, most obviously for being Jamaican, which adds layers to the story of English treasure-hunters sailing to an island near there to try to snatch a trove of legendary riches; nor is the show slow to see the class element in the mutiny on the Hispaniola, which Silver’s natural leadership qualities inspire.

He's a hypnotic foe for young treasure-hunter Jim Hawkins (Tom Sweet), but in this telling it’s a three-way psychological battle, because the role of Jim's innkeeper mother Bess is beefed up: as played by Hayley Atwell, she's a canny survivor whose widowhood has forced her to become a sharp judge of character and a smart marshal of every available resource. And she’s on the ship. With her on board, Treasure Island immediately becomes less overwhelmingly male, adding gender to its assessment of the iniquities of the 18th-Century pirate scene.

As well as bringing sex to the show’s salty mix – Bess knows her face, body and unmarried status are her currency, and the agency the show gives her means it’s a plot strand about exploitation that doesn’t itself become exploitative – Bess lends nuance to Jim’s coming of age, which is now a rebellion against parental control as well as just a boy having to quickly learn to survive in a man’s world.

Having the wise, perceptive Long John Silver become a father figure to Jim twists it again, while the fact that Bess’s presence is unexpected means we can’t be sure how her tale will end.

But what about the high seas adventures, the splicing of mainbraces and the swashing of bucklers? It’s suitably grimy and grim, a confined space richly rendered: in a production that can’t have been that expensive overall because it almost all takes place on a pretty small ship, time and money has nevertheless been invested in making everything look rough and sturdy. Rats nibbling the biscuits, Spaniards blowing holes in the side of the boat and the fierce Atlantic sunlight piercing the thick shadows of the brig are all vivid, albeit with a good slathering of big-drama sheen smoothing the unpleasantness out.

All that’s to come, though, for viewers of an opening episode that deals with the story’s prologue in the Hawkins inn on the west coast of England near Bristol, and which plays like a cross between a Western set in a beleaguered saloon, and a period drama where an unlikely marriage to the gentry is the only way out of poverty for plucky Bess and Jim.

The latter really does feel like old-fashioned TV entertainment, of a kind that’s almost been lost: this Treasure Island makes a strong effort to take us back there.

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Treasure Island arrives on Monday 12 October on Paramount+. You can sign up to Paramount+ for a seven-day free trial.

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