Why Nigel Planer is visiting Leith ship to share his love of teenage hero

Planer was 17, when he first saw a photograph of Stevenson.

“As a child, like everybody else, I had read Treasure Island and also Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - his two most famous books - and he was already up there as a favorite author of mine,” says Planer. “But my interest was piqued when I saw an article and a photograph of him in the South Seas. It's quite a famous photograph of him lounging with Fanny, his wife, and an islander. He was wearing drawstring trousers, no shoes and had long hair. He looked like he was at some sort of hippy festival. Of course, at the time, when I was 17, you got thrown out of school for having long hair. He looked like a rock star”.

This image started a 50-odd year fascination, with Planer, 71, becoming something of an expert on the author’s unusual 19th-century life. 

On November 16, you can find out more, as this comedian, musician and writer will be appearing at the luxury boat hotel, Fingal, which is docked at Port Of Leith. He’ll be regaling guests, who will also be having a four-course dinner and Treasure Island-themed cocktails, with stories of the author and sharing the reasons for his personal obsession. 

There’s bound to be a few laughs, too.

“I think some of the audience will undoubtedly be members of the Robert Louis Stevenson Society, quite a few of whom I've bumped into in the past. There will be some real aficionados,” Planer says. “They will know more than me, when it comes to details and dates, so I’ll definitely stick some jokes in there, to be safe”. 

The talk will also focus on the man, rather than Kidnapped or the other novels. Planer knows everything there is to know. 

“I tend to get stuck down certain rabbit holes that I find absolutely fascinating,” he says. “I read everything around it and everything anybody else has written about it. I get deeply involved”.

Planer points out that Stevenson was ‘ahead of his time’, and ‘something of an innovator’. As well as being a bit of a Bohemian, he was an anti-colonialist - though he didn’t always behave like one, adds Planer, who can be critical of his hero - and featured female characters in his books. He got involved in Samoa’s tribal politics and was a ‘radical thinker’.

“I find his adventures more exciting than books, because he really was quite an adventurer. He got involved in all sorts of things in Hawaii and in the Marquesas Islands,” says Planer. ”What interested me is his life, his relationship with his wife, who was a lot older than him and was American, his health, and his relationship with his father, which was pretty tempestuous. His breaking out from the confines of what he was born to do is what I find very attractive. He told his dad that he didn't believe in God, and that caused a major family rift”.

There will be plenty to discuss at the event. Planer might even be open to questions, especially as, back in 2010, he beat the likes of John Suchet on a celebrity edition of Mastermind, with the life of Stevenson as his specialist subject. 

He’s also written a play, Death of Long Pig, which is about the author, as well as another of Planer’s other heroes, Paul Gaugin, who also lived on the Polynesian islands. 

Among other things, the research for that 2009 writing project included consulting with expert Linda Dryden, a professor of English Literature at Napier University, and a trip out to the author’s former home, where Planer visited Stevenson’s final resting place, after he died of what is thought to be a brain hemorrhage in 1894 at just 44. 

“I went to Tahiti and Marquesas, and to his house,” he says. “I climbed all the way up Mount Vaea where his grave is, with the famous rhyme on it; 'Under the wide and starry sky, dig my grave and let me lie, glad did I live and gladly die….’”. 

Planer’s Fingal event will be taking place the day before Robert Louis Stevenson Day, which is the Treasure Island author’s birthday. This annual November 13 celebration usually involves a week’s worth of, as the website says, ‘moustache-twirling and velvet-clad’ events in the Capital, where Stevenson once lived at addresses including 17 Heriot Row. 

Although he’s one of the most famous Edinburgers, the author was never going to stay in the city. As a child, he had what is considered to have been tuberculosis, and that may be partially why he gravitated for hotter (and more exciting) climes. 

Stevenson left Scotland for Samoa in 1887, at the age of 29.

“It was very interesting for a writer who was very successful to take commissions from Scribner’s to travel the world and write back,” says Planer. "But he didn’t write back what they were expecting. He got very involved”.

Apparently, one of the reasons the author chose that destination is because it had a postal service, so he could keep writing for his publisher, with post emigration essays and books including South Sea Tales, St Ives, Catriona and The Ebb-Tide, among others. 

Stevenson never returned to his country of birth. 

As Planer says; “We had a half hearted attempt to get Edinburgh Airport renamed Robert Louis Stevenson Airport, because it’s the place you go to to get out of Edinburgh, but I don't think the council were very happy, especially with the suggestion coming from me, a Londoner”.

Well, at least we have a whole day dedicated to the author.

And another way to celebrate it, the evening before.

Tickets for the FIngal event are £175, see www.fingal.co.uk/packages-and-offers/celebrating-robert-louis-stevenson/