Review: Monkey!, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until July 12

11:40am Wednesday 2nd July 2008

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ASIA doesn’t do pantomimes, but if it did, it would probably look like Dominic Leclerc’s version of Monkey!, the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s contribution to China Now, the largest ever festival of Chinese culture in Britain.

Cross the acrobatics and colourful pageantry of the Chinese State Circus with the leaping, blade-flashing feats of The House Of Flying Daggers school of epic Eastern film-making, and you have the visual style of the Bradford-born director’s often air-borne entertainment.

Then add Colin Teevan’s script from his 2001 adaptation for the Young Vic, for Leclerc to conjure a fast, free-flowing, physical family show pitched at seven year olds and upward. With its combination of storytelling, circus skills, trapeze and flying on bouncy bungee cords, the show could equally have run at Christmas, and would surely have played to fuller houses than Monday’s low attendance if it had done so.

Monkey! has the playfulness of the woefully dubbed hokum Japanese television series of the late-1970s, but rather than being episodic it follows the saga of the Monkey King all the way through the Chinese myth and 16th Century book Journey To The West in two ebullient halves.

Introduced by Matt Costain’s Buddha with Eastern philosophical portent, Jami Reid-Quarrell’s shock-haired Monkey is mischievous and full of trickery but ever true, shamelessly vain yet brave: a rule breaker and trouble magnet whose defiance of Yama, King of Death (Costain again) and munching of forbidden peaches has him locked inside a mountain for 500 years.

He can gain redemption only by guiding Buddhist monk Tripitaka (magical rope artiste and dancer Wendy Hesketh) on a sacred quest.

Once joined on Liz Cooke’s dark and shiny set by Mike Goodenough’s portly Pigsy and Dominic Gatley’s fish dragon Sandy, characters and journey alike are reminiscent of The Wizard Of Oz. The cast of eight bounces humour off the audience with brash enthusiasm and cartoon-broad characterisation, but Teevan’s storytelling could be more magical in its language and clear in its path.

You cannot fault the irrepressible energy, but the physical spectacle, martial arts and the breathtaking sight of beautiful silken fabric disappearing down a trapdoor far surpass the somewhat prosaic drama.

Box office: 0113 213 7700.