Christopher Buckley as Roger, Matilda Howe as Titty, Joel Sams as John and Rosalind Steele as Susan. Photo: Eastern Angles.

Peter Willis reviews Eastern Angles’ new production of the stage version of the Ransome classic.

You enter via a proper checkpoint, then drive for ages across a seemingly disused, but actually repurposed airfield (a film studio here, an onion grading depot there) until you come to a huge hangar-like building. This is the Hush House, built for testing jet engines, and inside you find a sort of dismembered yacht.

It’s the Goblin, the boat in which four children, aged between about 10 and 14, drift out into the North Sea and, somehow, get it under control and manage to sail to Holland. This is Arthur Ransome’s “We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea”, cleverly adapted for the stage by Nick Wood, and presented by Eastern Angles, the Ipswich-based touring theatre group.

The yacht is cunningly deconstructed to provide different spaces for the action – cockpit, foredeck, cabin – and, I suspect, built a bit oversized to emphasise the puny immaturity of its occupants. The children are all played by grown-up actors, the elder two, John and Susan, being a bit taller than their younger siblings, Titty and Roger.

All four give sparkling performances – as it happens Joel Sams (as John the steady aspirant skipper) and Rosalind Steele (mistress of the mutinous look and, it turns out a dab hand at the bowline knot) are both old hands, having acted in previous Ransome productions, while Matilda Howe at Titty and Christopher Buckley as Roger are newly graduated from stage school, something that doesn’t prevent them from very nearly stealing the show.

This is at least partly thanks to Nick Woods’ script which ingeniously expands the role of the two ‘brats’, as Susan sometimes likes to call them. In Ransome’s book they are very secondary to the tension between John and Susan over what is the best thing to do – go back or go on. That’s still the mainstay of the drama here of course, but it’s alleviated by giving fuller rein to the humour always lurking under the surface in Ransome’s writing. Roger’s aggrieved remarks, and his capacity for stating the obvious are particularly helpful in this regard, and Christopher Buckley has a talent for getting full value out of them. Titty meanwhile, passionate and romantic, is the one who discovers the drama in the crisis (or crises) and Matilda Howe, an actor to her fingertips, irradiates the role.

Just occasionally the humour threatens to drown the drama, but when things get serious, the script and the actors rise to the occasion. The scene where the Goblin turns into the wind, and her crew are tossed about, clinging on for dear life in their tiny cockpit is sheer physical magic.

The ‘secondary’ roles – each of the four actors has to play an incidental character, by quickly donning a hat and coat or some such – are also successfully carried off, though John’s depiction of Mother as an Okay-yah patrician is a long way removed from the Virginia McKenna ‘best of all natives’ model. Susan, as Daddy, who appears in a sort of vision to John in the middle of the night, has the most challenging task. Titty, with just a peaked cap and a pipe effortlessly becomes the Dutch Pilot. But it’s Roger’s Jim Brading which – apart from an incongruously flat northern accent – really impresses. He gets instantly into the part of the experienced, encouraging older, but not that much older, sailor.

Ransome’s book, widely regarded as his best, is about a rite of passage – literally and metaphorically. In graduating from dinghies on lakes to the open sea, the children are learning to grow up. It’s a voyage that has the audience engrossed.

“We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea” is at the Hush House, Bentwaters Parks, near Woodbridge, Suffolk until 9th July, and then from 13-17th July at Nene Park, Peterborough. More details at easternangles.co.uk,