Lionboy moves at a cracking pace

As the many readers of the Lionboy trilogy will know, Charlie Ashanti is a remarkable boy.

For a start he is the son of parents who are scientists trying to save humanity from an evil drugs company, The Corporacy. When they are kidnapped, Charlie sets out to find them, pursued by the evil Rafi henchman (Robert Gilbert). He has little to help him, except an ability to speak cat, a talent he picked up when he was infected by a wound from a big cat’s paw. The quest takes him way across half the world, for most of the first act aboard the magical circus ship Celeste, where he meets a troupe of abused lions which he eventually rescues.

Marcelo Dos Santos has done a marvellous job in compressing the complicated plot and its themes of environmentalism and anti-capitalism into a two-hour production that had the young audience cheering. Though full of spectacle, the production is light on technology, and many of the effects are created by the actors themselves.

There were some athletic performances, notably Lisa Kerr as Pirouette the acrobat and as Ninu the chameleon, and Femi Elufowuju Jr as the wicked lion trainer Maccomo. Charlie (Adetomiwa Edun) is heroic and innocent at the same time, a difficult trick to pull off. But though the play moves at a cracking pace, there were times when I felt it almost worked against them.

The laboratories of the Corporacy are destroyed in a James Bond style act of sabotage that seemed just a little too easy.

Nick Le Mesurier