“We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea”, by Arthur Ransome, adapted by Nick Wood, Eastern Angles, until Saturday 2nd August 2008.

Locations familiar to every Suffolk resident, the ingenious staging for which Eastern Angles is famous for, an adventure with echoes of Saturday morning “pictures” and Boy’s Own comics. How could the newest production from the Ipswich based touring theatre company go wrong?

Before beginning touring venues in Suffolk and Norfolk, “We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea” is being performed (until Sunday 6th July) on the dockside at Ipswich. With the River Orwell, where the story begins, almost lapping the marquee, the audience settled down to see what Nick Wood had achieved with his adaptation of the story that we enjoyed reading as children, and to our own children.

The story is of a family of four children who, following their adventures in “Swallows and Amazons”, (Ransome’s previous book) move to Pin Mill in Suffolk, and are desperate to try their sailing skills on a tidal river.

From two sides, the audience looked down on the small wooden boat, imaginatively interpreted by Eastern Angles designer Rosie Alabaster. The older children, John (Duncan Barrett) and Susan (Laura Stevely) are suitably bossy but brave, while Titty (Sarah Hunt) and Roger (David Ashwood) are the over-enthusiastic, annoying, yet funny, younger siblings.

With ropes to pull, sails to raise, anchors to lower and a mast to climb, there is much technical action, which a sailor in the audience told me was “pretty accurate.” The action is necessarily confined to a small space but the hours the children spend adrift in fog, then battling against wind and waves are convincingly portrayed using sound effects, music, and projection. I wasn’t the only one in the audience to gasp as a buoy nearly hit the “Goblin” as it made its unplanned journey to Holland from Suffolk.

Well acted and cleverly dramatised, the only fault really is with the original book! I remembered it with great fondness but as I watched the play it came back to me how I had flicked through all the tedious descriptions of sailing terms that were presumably intended to teach young readers how to sail.

As you can’t flick over the pages when watching a play, you can always count the number of times Suffolk landmarks were mentioned, I suppose. There are a lot!  Once the play got past the lesson stage, things started to get more exciting and the laughs were greater too.

It is always initially a bit awkward when actors in their twenties are playing children, but the cast, combining their juvenile roles with those of the adult characters, soon convinced us, with help from their “short, back and sides” or pigtails, knee length shorts, plimsolls, and all the other symbols of 1930’s childhood.

Fans of Arthur Ransome, sailing, or Suffolk’s rivers will love the play…. But I wish the action started a bit sooner as I don’t intend learning to sail – not if there’s any chance of being swept out to sea!

Rachel Sloane
July 2008

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