Akram Khan Company, Jungle Book Reimagined review ★★★★★

Akram Khan has become quite the prophet of doom. Hard on the heels of his 2021 claustrophobic Creature, an unremittingly bleak reflection on man’s destructiveness, which has just just been reprised at Sadler’s Wells, the theatre now hosts the first London outing of his Jungle Book Reimagined, which had its world premiere in Leicester last year.

‘Reimagined’ is the operative word. This is not a stage adaptation of Kipling’s The Jungle Book, as a little boy sitting behind me, who was clearly familiar with the book, discovered to his confusion. As for me, I found it very helpful to have the programme open on my lap at the synopsis page.

Rather, it is Khan’s cry of alarm at both man-made climate change and man’s cruelty to other living things.

Through complex and mostly effective multimedia, Jungle Book Reimagined tells the story of Mowgli, a young girl who's separated from her mother in the fierce floods caused by persistent, unseasonable rainstorms, and ends up in an abandoned city where animals are in charge.

She meets a pack of wolves led by Raksha and Rama; later, too, the bear Baloo and an albino panther called Bagheera; a troupe of monkeys, or Bandar-log, and Kaa, a rock python.

The animals, all of whom have been tormented by humans, learn to trust Mowgli and they help each other survive. Mowgli repays their kindness by killing a hunter, before going off again in search of her own kind.

It’s hard to find an all-encompassing definition for this work: more than simply dance-theatre, it involves a lot of voiced narrative, music, projections and some dance, with a commensurately long list of creatives.

Akram Kahn choreographs and directs; text is credited to Tariq Jordan, with dramaturgy care of Sharon Clark. The musical score was commissioned from award-winning composer Jocelyn Pook, her third collaboration with Khan following Desh and Dust. Michael Hulls, also a regular Khan contributor, provided the dusky lighting design.

And the undoubted jewel of this production, video design and animation came from YeastCulture, which flooded the stage with transporting images of violent rainstorms, and a variety of animals, including scurrying mice, fleeing giraffes and imposing, wise old elephants.

Which is not to say that the dozen dancers of the Akram Khan Company didn’t play their parts admirably. They did. Their dance interludes were compelling, with subtle hints of Khan’s kathak heritage accentuating their connection with the earth.

It’s just that attempting to impersonate animals without the full panoply of costumes and make-up – The Lion King this certainly isn’t – they spent far too long crawling on all fours, or, in the case of the Bandar-log performing generic ape gestures, not all of which apply to monkeys.

Most disappointing in a show which often reached heights of creativity and inventiveness was the portrayal of the python as a line of cardboard boxes.

All that said, there were many times when Jungle Book Reimagined had me rapt, the same as the rest of the audience, a large number of whom were children.


Age Guidance: 8+