Metta Theatre’s Jungle Book offers a surprisingly unique take on an old classic. Reimagined as a cross cultural urban dreamscape, the production forgoes talking animals for circus skilled gangsters, graffiti artists and skateboarders. Director Poppy Burton-Morgan injects some new blood into an old tale through a hugely talented cast.
With recent remakes in the audience’s mind, this genuinely refreshing interpretation of The Jungle Book provides relief from our encroaching boredom with the story. Through a dynamic fusion of street dance, hip-hop, and enough feats of acrobatics to raise the blood pressure, the show excels with Kendra Horsburgh’s brilliant choreography. The emotional connection between the young girl Mowgli and her street wise “wolf pack” is beautifully illustrated through dynamic individual dance styles.
The spirited range of performances are without doubt, the stand outs of the production. While these little vignettes of dance scattered through the plot feel episodic at times, it’s hard not to enjoy the spectacle of Alfa Mark’s fearless aerial hooping as Mowlgi, and Nathalie Alison’s pole dancing as Kaa.
The show’s pacing however, presents something of an issue. Heavy on exposition, Act I entertainingly tours well known elements of the story, albeit with the confusing addition of Mowgli’s mother. From then, the narrative struggles to make much impact in Act II. Mowgli’s return to the grey “city suits” serves as a reminder of the urban jungle metaphor and not much else. The show is simply less interesting when focused on Mowgli’s self-discovery rather than the push and pull of the jungle’s vibrant animal inhabitants.
The pace reaches a peak with an imaginative strobe lighting police raid on the “tiger” Shere Khan. The cast once again proving that the show is reliant on their ability to move with a crackling energy with limited props across a sparse stage.
The latter half of the show alerts the audience of the wider social issues threaded through this production. The occasional rap reminds the audience of the colossal themes of cultural integration and acceptance that are deserving of more stage time. Crucially relevant nuances of class struggles appear as something of an afterthought, overshadowed by the dazzling acrobatics on display.
However, the good intentions behind pulling such a classic into the frame of 21st Century multi-cultural class divides, offers a hopeful message for its young audience, and a welcome fresh take for adults familiar with the tale.
The power in Metta Theatre’s Jungle Book resides firmly on the shoulders of its seven performers. Their exuberance and indisputable talent carries the show through its narrative stumbling, giving real emotional depths to this pulsing adaptation of Kipling’s classic tale.
“tension was sorely lacking, and the play’s violent denouement was a damp squib
Jermyn Street Theatre is a little gem of a venue a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. It was great to see a sold-out house for the opening night of The Wasp, and the quality set design on display (excellent work by Mike Leopold) promised an evening’s theatre to match. For this reviewer, alas, that promise was not fulfilled.
The Wasp by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm is a two-handed thriller, in which a pair of estranged school friends meet as adults, and a train of events is set in motion fuelled by a couple of violent incidents in their shared past. This is a tried-and-tested formula, and despite one genuinely surprising plot twist, formulaic is how the writing felt. The monologues felt like set pieces, and the dialogue was often over-explanatory; there was never enough work for the audience to do. This was particularly true in the exposition of the play’s central symbolic image – the parasitic tarantula hawk moth – but equally present in the women’s conversation. ‘It looks like we’re more like each other than we thought then, eh?’ Carla says at one point. There’s more fun for the audience in seeing that for itself.
Similarly, the characters themselves rarely strayed beyond stereotype. From the moment we meet them – Carla, all fake tan and gold, heavily pregnant and smoking a fag, and Heather, dressed from the Browns catalogue and drinking a camomile tea – the two women remain trapped in the tropes of their class background. Lisa Gorgin (Carla) and Selina Giles (Heather) worked well together, and there was some lovely detail in each performance, but despite the emotional reveal at the play’s heart, there was little scope for them to go beyond the skin-deep. As a result, tension was sorely lacking, and the play’s violent denouement was a damp squib. On-stage violence is frequently difficult to pull off, and the play needed stronger directorial decisions here, to enable credibility in such an intimate space.
It would have been interesting to see where Anna Simpson (Director) could have taken us with less naturalistic emphasis. There was a nod to a slightly more abstract theatrical language in the transition between Scene 1 and 2, but it didn’t go far enough, and, as a result, what could have been an eerie interlude came across as as a slightly clumsy scene change. The trouble with naturalism is that it is easy to set situations up for a fall; I, for one, have never known a heavily pregnant woman last so long without needing a pee, and we all know what a mess knives make.
In a world saturated with (often excellent) television thrillers, the theatre can only hold its own by drawing on its strengths. The Wasp failed to deliver on these, and thus was devoid of sting.
