The Jungle Book (tour – Watford)
There is nothing Disneyesque or dumbed-down about this Birmingham Stage Company show, and it’s a tribute to adapter Stuart Paterson, director Neal Foster and designer Jacqueline Trousdale that a very young audience at the matinee performance I saw sat absolutely enthralled for the whole two hours.
Our young hero Mowgli is played by Samuel Hargreaves, credible as the boy who has to learn to be a man while acknowledging his debt to the junge denizens who have reared him. Natasha Lewis doubles the two caring mother roles – wolf Raksha and human Messua. In the large cast, Laura Waggott as the queenly python Kaa and Iwan Tudor as wolf-pack leader Akela stand out.
Villain of the piece is, of course, Shere Khan; Peter Sowerrbutts gives him authority as well as menace. This contrasts well with Zephryn Taitte’s Bagheera and village headman Buldeo as with Rob Hughes’s Baloo. There are a couple of carefully-placed opportunities for audience participation, but they’re not really needed. It holds its own as a literary classic given theatrical life. I suspect there’s now going to be a run on libraries and bookshops for the original tales.
