THE JUNGLE BOOK
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Like Never-Never Land, the island created by Kipling contemporary James Barrie for his hero Peter Pan, the jungle world Mowgli must leave behind is a magic place–beautiful and terrible, filled with love and friendship and excitement and awful violence, governed by elaborate codes of honor, and populated by scary-wonderful friends and enemies. It is the eventual separation from these companions–animals all (and what child wouldn’t prefer talking panthers and wolves and bears and monkeys to mere people for playmates?)–that gives the Jungle books their emotional tug, their haunting edge of melancholy and mystery that enriches the thrilling, sometimes humorous adventures of Mowgli.
Lifeline Theatre bills its stage adaptation of the Kipling stories as “the original” Jungle Book in an effort to distance their production from the two well-known movie versions. A 1942 film starring Sabu unconvincingly dubbed in voices over live animal footage to portray Mowgli’s upbringing among the “Free People” of the jungle; the 1967 Walt Disney cartoon trivialized the material into a jungly, soft-rock Song of the South. Meryl Friedman and Christina Calvit, director and author respectively of Lifeline’s staging (their other credits include Lifeline’s literary adaptations Pride and Prejudice and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), have eschewed any effort to portray realistic or caricatured animals, or to lighten up Kipling’s narrative. Working in a vein of theatrical abstraction and ritual, the Lifeline company revels in the darkness and eeriness of the stories. The tone is set in the exciting and spooky opening, with its dissonant vocal tone clusters, throbbing percussion, and chanted delivery of Kipling’s text. Rather than trying to depict animals, the costumes suggest animalism–a wise variation of Kipling’s use of animal types to satirize human foibles. Laura Cunningham and Margaret Fitzsimmons-Morettini’s costume designs make striking use of Indian prints. Shere Khan, the cruel and vengeful tiger whose determined and deadly pursuit of Mowgli (like Captain Hook’s of Peter Pan ) fuels the story, is arrayed as a grand, slightly decadent Indian warlord, garbed in regal reds and adorned with tigerishly striped makeup. Mowgli is a shirtless youth dashingly dressed in baggy trousers and a red sash.
