Reviewed by Lee Farley and youngsters from the Perfect Circle team
Metta Theatre’s dance / circus / hip-hop theatre version of Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’ arrives at Malvern Theatres as part of a tour to celebrate the company’s 10-year anniversary. I took two 14 year-old members of Perfect Circle Youth Theatre along with me to help review the production.
This is a modern urban jungle – Baloo is a street cleaner in a hi-vis jacket, Bagheera is a graffiti artist, the wolves have skateboards and Shere Khan is a rapper. We’re introduced to the characters as part of an opening dance sequence which sets the scene for the rest of the production. The story is split into a series of impressive dance / circus routines including trapeze work, puppetry and acrobatics.
We all enjoyed the production, particularly the physical dance work.
Lizzie’s review: “The production contained a wide variety of music, with each character having its own specific melody that played over the others’ in each scene. For example, Mowgli’s theme was very tinkly and childish to reflect her personality. The music was generally very upbeat and hip hop based, but some of this was unfortunately lost. This had an especially bad effect on the recorded speaking parts, as important plot points were sometimes overlooked. However, you could see the music reflecting the mood and situation of each scene.”
Lorna says: “While I thoroughly enjoyed the entire performance of ‘The Jungle Book’, the thing that really stood out was the dance. The production features so many dances expressed in many different ways, and this played a key part of the performance. With an amazing trapeze act among many other jaw-dropping dances, the powerful choreography and skill in this performance is evident. Unfortunately, because of the focus on dance rather than speech, some of the actual plot was lost, with some scenes being unclear. This made the plot quite hard to follow, and subtracted from the overall effect of the performance. However, since the majority of the audience were young children, I do not think that the lack of a clear plot hindered the performance as much as it could have. My favourite part of ‘The Jungle Book’ has to be the skater wolf pack which finds Mowgli as a baby, with typical urban noises coming together in song and dance to form what is effectively the pack’s own theme song.”
I think we agreed that all the performers are terrific, including the local youth community chorus who performed as wolves and monkeys. The dance sequences are brilliantly choreographed, but the production lacks some narrative clarity – partly due to sound quality, partly due to vocal articulation. I also felt the production might have found more opportunities to include humour to vary its rhythms and energy.
The Jungle Book will be shown at Malvern Theatres on Saturday at 2.30pm and 7pm.
