Shere Khan sounds like the name of a Bollywood screen idol. And that's just how he looks in this production, swishing around dandyishly in his tiger-skin frock-coat and shimmying along in the hip, Hindi film-style choreography by Sam Spencer-Lane.
Kipling's children's stories have spawned a hit cartoon and a paramilitary boy's movement. Here they are transformed into a slightly uneven alternative pantomime by Richard Williams, whose production comes with great Asian-dub-tinged music by Stephen McNeff and is neatly designed by Janey Gardiner, who drapes everything beneath a high-tech canopy of neon-green fronds.
Williams's inspired adaptations of Dickens have been a Christmas highlight at Liverpool Playhouse in recent years, but whereas he brilliantly elucidated the frosty undercurrents of A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, the sinister side of Kipling's parable evades him. As a young boy, Kipling was dispatched to Kent to be brought up by foster parents, and the books are as much about the terrors of the south coast as the Seeonee hills.
Shorn of its context of childhood fears, The Jungle Book becomes little more than a good-natured episode of Animal Crackers with dull, didactic interludes. But what really seems to hold Williams's adaptation back is the dryness of the material. Whereas everything Dickens wrote was infused with the theatre, Kipling cannot help ascending to the pulpit. It's hard to be hip and preachy at the same time.
However, I enjoyed Mark Brignal's bedraggled, guitar-toting Baloo, who seems to have mistaken the jungle for a 1970s Swedish commune. Amanda Gordon's Bagheera cuts a governessy figure in her Victorian widow's weeds, although Suzanne Cave's snake-hipped Kaa seems to have been in consultation with Victoria Beckham's stylist.
The energetic Michael Everest leads a feckless band of loose-cannon monkeys who live lawlessly on the fringes of society. Unaccountably, they are Welsh. Good to see a spot of gratuitous xenophobia. Mr Kipling always did exceedingly good hate.
· Until January 18. Box office: 01244 344238.
