Forget Disney and the cute little creature with big watery eyes. In puppeteers Green Ginger's version of the story, based on Felix Saltern's original 1926 tale, Bambi becomes a young boy living in an urban jungle. Here the hunters are called Visors and ruthlessly hunt down the dispossessed such as Bambi and his family, who live on a car tip. Green Ginger's nightmarish vision is closer to Saltern's tale than Disney's 1942 film, which sanitised the story and omitted all reference to Bambi's handicapped brother Gobo, and his search for his dad.
This 80-minute descent into a world of fear, terrorist cells, haves and have-nots, hunters and hunted, isn't a pretty sight; nor is it what you'd call either an enjoyable or particularly coherent evening. But Green Ginger will make you gasp with the scale of its theatrical imagination, its highly developed sense of the bizarre and the brilliance of its puppetry technique.
Sometimes you are not sure whether you are watching a puppet or a live actor, and film is seamlessly spliced into the performance. The ingenuity is staggering, the unconventionality always poised at the point of freakishness. The skill involved is beyond doubt. Yet cleverly it also relates to a real world. Poised between future, present and past, the show succeeds in conveying some of the sense of terror, despair and horror of living under apartheid in South Africa or in the Balkans.
That is not to say that it all works. But this is so different from almost anything else that you're ever likely to see in the theatre that it deserves an audience. Failure with such flair is a rare and wonderful thing.
Until March 10. Box office: 020-8741 2311.
