Chichester Festival Youth Theatre are promising Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book this Christmas as you’ve never seen it before.
The classic tale comes in a brand-new adaptation by Sonali Bhattacharyya spinning into exciting, pulsating life from Saturday, December 16-Sunday, December 31 on the main-house stage.
The classic tale comes in a brand-new adaptation by Sonali Bhattacharyya spinning into exciting, pulsating life from Saturday, December 16-Sunday, December 31 on the main-house stage.
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Ann Sussex Newspapers. Lovely
00:06 this afternoon to speak to Matt Hassell, who is working this Christmas with Chichester
00:10 Special Youth Theatre, which is always one of the great highlights of the year, on the
00:14 Christmas production of Jungle Book. Now, how on earth do you bring the Jungle Book
00:18 to the stage?
00:20 Well, we're hoping to bring it to life in a very imaginative and energetic way. I think
00:27 we were really excited about the idea of working with the Youth Theatre and what that allowed
00:33 us to do and the way that we might look at the story. And when you're working with 70
00:38 young people, the energy and the imagination is enormous. And I guess a big thing for us
00:44 and I hope for the production is that we get to capture that and bring that to life on
00:48 the stage. So it should feel like it's a very wild version of the Jungle Book in every sense
00:53 of the word.
00:54 That sounds exciting. And you were saying it's about reinterpreting the story for our
00:58 modern day, isn't it? Going back to a story that was written quite some time ago. So you're
01:02 looking at it in a slightly different way, aren't you?
01:05 Yeah, I think it asks, by going back to the story and previous versions of the Jungle
01:11 Book, it allowed us to look at what are some of the key themes and threads that run through
01:14 them all and which of those things feel particularly pertinent to us now, partly because they're
01:19 universal and so they're timeless, but also because they maybe feel, again, working with
01:24 a young company, like they have a particular resonance. And one of the key things in the
01:29 story is for Mowgli trying to establish how she fits into the world around her and working
01:35 with a company who are aged between 11 and 20. That feels like a really pressing question.
01:41 You're asking yourself at that point in your life, who am I and who am I in relation to
01:45 the people around me and who am I in relation to the world around me?
01:50 And that's a big age range, isn't it?
01:52 Yeah, it's really, I mean, that's what's really, and there's a generation in the company, which
01:55 is really exciting. And we were really interested in looking at the characters through that
02:00 lens. If this was a group of young people, what hierarchies would exist between them,
02:04 what groups would exist between them? And so that actually our characters all exist in
02:09 a kind of similar proximity to each other in terms of age. And the other theme that
02:16 felt particularly resonant and also particularly for a festive show is the idea of family.
02:20 And a big thing for Mowgli is trying to consider who is her family and what constitutes family
02:25 when the people that you are brought up by and the people around you are very different
02:30 to you. And the sort of the idea of what family is feel like it sits at the heart of a festive
02:36 show. And that also feels really exciting for our version.
02:40 That's great. So you were saying, talking about looking at something very familiar in
02:44 a slightly different way, you've mentioned it, your two Mowglis, you have alternating
02:48 cast are girls, aren't they? Female Mowglis. What's the story?
02:51 I think for us, if you're going to take something that we know really well, I think myself and
02:57 Sean Lee, the writer and Ruth, the composer, wanted to find ways in which we could connect
03:04 that familiarity, but also find new ways through it rather than it didn't feel particularly
03:10 exciting for us to kind of do a version that felt overly familiar. And through developing
03:17 the show, it started to become really interesting to us for what if Mowgli became a female character,
03:23 what could that do to her experiences? And what would that do to creating a really strong
03:29 and tenacious character who was having to discover who she is? And that felt like it
03:39 offered loads more to us than maybe retaining the version that we might expect it to be.
03:46 It sounds thoroughly intriguing and very appealing. And it's shaping up well,
03:50 is it, as we get closer? Yeah.
03:51 Some time to go, haven't you? Yeah, I mean, yeah, really. Yes, definitely.
03:55 And that's the other exciting thing with a new show is we don't know how it works. We're learning
04:00 how it works as we go. And that's both in terms of how the story is told, how the music works,
04:05 but also how to stage it. And obviously, what's amazing about the Festival Theatre is
04:08 it's a very unique space. And so we not only have to, not only are we considering how the show
04:15 works and it's sort of the DNA of it, but we're also constantly looking at how it works in the
04:19 space here. And again, we hope to create something that feels very exciting, that feels a little bit
04:24 like you don't quite know what's going to happen next or where something's going to appear from.
04:28 The jungle itself feels like a place that is full of surprises and you wouldn't quite know what was
04:33 waiting around the corner. And we hope in the realisation of our version that our audience
04:37 will get a little bit of a taste of that with things popping up here, there and everywhere.
04:41 It sounds fantastic. And as I said, it's always a genuine highlight of the year. So very,
04:45 very much looking forward to seeing it. Lovely to speak to you, Matt. Thank you for your time.
04:49 Thank you so much, Phil. Thank you.
04:50 Thank you. Bye-bye then.