The Jungle Book

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

Hoping to momentarily escape the Christmas chill, I visited The West Yorkshire Playhouse with the hope of being transported to a tropical jungle teeming with life. And I wasn’t disappointed.

“Turn your phone off - you naughty monkeys,” chirps a jovial tannoy announcement, warming up the show’s family audience.

The stage is smokey and dimly green-lit as high up on two platforms African style drums ring out. Four spot-lights suddenly illuminate yet more drummers in brown Indian style dress, simultaneously revealing Laura Hopkins’ lush set.

Writer, Rosanna Lowe, begins her re-imagining of Rudyard Kipling’s well-loved book with stage crew carrying on a grotesque puppet baby. Cooing noises accompany baby Mowgli as he bobs around the stage, passed by other crew carting around a variety of jungle life, including a hopping frog, a porcupine, vultures, bees on metal wires and flowers.

After a mercifully short time, the hideous puppet finally disappears to be replaced by Jacob James Beswick playing a grown-up Mowgli. Hopkins’ tree top rope bridges, tarzan-style vines and clever rotating cliff perfectly complement his zest for life, allowing him to clamber about the stage like a child exploring a giant adventure playground.

Training Mowgli to safely navigate his jungle home, are glowing red-eyed she wolf, Raksha (Cath Whitefield), slinky heeled panther, Bagheeera (Ann Ogbomo), and a giant Hagrid type character, the bearded and stilted bear, Baloo (Daniel Copeland).Threats to young Mowgli are posed by a gang of “King of Bling” monkeys in Burberry and shell suit trackies, complete with gold chains and jungle bad boy Shere Khan (Andrew French) who sports J-shaped carbon-fibre prosthetics. Less key, but equally wonderful in appearance, are the peacocks, vultures, crocodile and python.

A series of unpolished songs written especially for this new Playhouse production begin with baby Mowgli being taken to visit the wolf pack to decide his fate. The vocals aren’t loud enough and the whole performance sounds more like a warm-up than the final product. Follow-up, Jungle Law, feels equally amateur with very laboured singing from Baloo as Mowgli learns cunning and tactics to use against Shere Khan. The “Monkey City” rap features almost indecipherable lyrics that are cleverly detracted from by Hopkins’ clever fold-out organic set, wowing us with the miraculous appearance of an overgrown car complete with buried treasure and a very randomly placed glitzy grand piano. Duet “Wild Boy”, again features slightly ropey vocals but is fun to watch nonetheless.

The play’s second half is exceedingly odd indeed, opening with an orange tent, representing a travelling community living on the edge of the jungle. Human characters wear masks to disguise the fact cast members are playing multiple parts, unfortunately resembling rather sinister bank robbers.

The appearance of their rather camp sounding community leader, Buldeo (Colin Connor), almost turns the show into a full blown comedy as he minces around wearing some kind of weird teddy-boy street cowboy jungle ensemble. Other characters are dressed in equally bizarre costumes, combining gaucho and traditional Indian dress mixed in with western style clothes to represent the nomadic community, suggesting every charity shops in the north was raided pre-production.

Director, Liam Steel’s decision to give characters a strange melting-pot of accents only adds to its absurdity as Mowgli’s adopted human mother, Messua (Shobna Gulati), says, “These things be nowt but trouble,” while his Scottish sounding half sister, Dulia (Anneika Rose), looks on.

Such inexplicable decisions, mixed with weak overall vocals (aside from Japjit Kaur’s between scene singing) and an overly long running-time makes watching The Playhouse’s Jungle Book comparable to a big budget secondary school production.

The show has a variety of commendable moral messages (teachings against rash thinking, man’s destruction of the environment/deforestation...), elicits a versatile performance from its lead and clearly tries to be creative; while it may not live up to the expectations of older viewers, it clearly appeals to little ones who, at times, enthusiastically heckled characters and responded well to pantomime style “He’s behind you” moments.

  • The Jungle Book is on at The West Yorkshire Playhouse until January 18.

Leo Owen