The Concrete Jungle Book – Pleasance Theatre

Concrete Jungle Book at the Pleasance Theatre, London [image of original cast]. Picture: Alex Brenner

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

The HighRise theatre collective first created The Concrete Jungle Book in 2017, working with young people from the Centrepoint homeless charity to present a tale in which Rudyard Kipling’s jungle stories are retold among rundown council estates.

For this reworked revival, HighRise’s NewGens youth associate company takes the reins. A last-minute injury means that the lead character of Mo is now played by Lauryn Louise, taking on the role just hours before curtain up. And yet it is an assured performance, the heart and soul of writer/director Dominic Garfield’s piece.

Mo’s character is sealed in part by her relationship with Joseph RA Lindsay’s Bagheera, who discovered her as an abandoned baby and placed her in a foster home which is now facing closure. Unaware that her friend and father figure has signed adoption papers, the 15-year-old Mo runs away, escaping into the concrete jungle.

Throughout, action is driven along by thumping beats originally composed by Duncan Burton and supplemented by Jack D’Arcy’s live guitar playing. Snatches of recognisable samples can be heard in the mix, too: at appropriate points one can hear snatches of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, ‘The Eye of the Tiger’, even a phrase or two of the Sherman Brothers’ songs from the Disney adaptation of Kipling’s tales.

It is when Mo first meets Baloo (Lesley Rietta Cobbina), an ursine, streetwise queen of the homeless community, that the power of Garfield’s setting begins to make itself shown. For while this is a show that will appeal to kids, it does not shy away from the harder edges of life. Baloo’s “honey”, to which she is so addicted, is a clear metaphor for other, harder substances, while the various gangs into whose clutches Mo falls – from jackals to monkeys – are keen to exploit this vulnerable child and get her to do their dirty work in return for food and shelter.

As Baloo and Bagheera reluctantly team up to look for Mo, their differing outlooks on life provides for laughs as much as it does for tension. Comedy, too, comes from Michael Mbozo in a number of roles, including Kaa. Fans of the Disney adaptation expecting a duplicitous snake will instead find a more ambiguous character, full of the stuffiness and pomposity of the movie’s Colonel Hathi yet also possessing some of the seer-like characteristics of The Lion King’s Rafiki.

Similar light notes can be found in the interplay of the various gangs, each iteration of which are typically played by Mbozo, Ché Gordon and Che Campbell (the latter of which usually plays the dumb comedy foil). Jack Boal starts off as a fellow gang member, but really shines as the leader of the monkeys, the gloriously campy Louie Slippaz. His outré clothing choices – who would expect a corset under a puffer jacket – bring a sense of urban chic. And while Boal’s rapping feels closer to a contestant’s attempts to get out of singing in an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the incongruity of his character in a world full of grime and darkness is welcome.

The show’s hour of running time races by, marred only in places where some performers’ singing and rapping struggling to be heard over the played-in beats. Some of this is surely down to the last minute cast changes – but even when not at their most audible, the commitment to each character ensures that the story is always crystal clear.

Garfield leaves the story with Mo’s future undecided. Did she get out? Did she stay, and clean up her neighbourhood? Or did she get dragged back down into the underworld and disappear for ever? The Concrete Jungle Book’s willingness to embrace ambiguity is one of its many virtues.

Scott Matthewman