Monkey: Journey to the West

Theatre/musicals/operas are odd beasts, and generally speaking I try to avoid them like a particularly virulent form of plague. They tend to be performed by drama school dropouts and also-rans; the sort of people who cannot act and cannot sing and are on the stage solely because of their heightened but utterly misplaced belief in their own talent.

That is not to say you will never find anything worth seeing that fall into one of the above categories. And so, when I head about Monkey: Journey to the West; a mix of music, drama, myth, martial arts and animation, I was intrigued. In fact I was so intrigued that by the time I walked into the theatre I was almost excited.

Actually, it is a bit of a lie when I say I walked into a theatre. It was little more than a tent, crudely constructed in the grounds of the O2*. Not only did it look like like a budget version of a tent a rock festival, it seemed to struggle against the elements of the November weather. As the wind picked up, the tent walls were buffeted and the entire structure looked immensely precarious. The whole thing started to remind me of an Irwin Allen disaster movie. And the sad truth is that a catastrophic tent collapse would not have been top the detriment of the show; in fact it would have made the whole shamelessly shite farrago a little bit more interesting.

It is difficult to describe all that was wrong with the show. Mainly because there was so little that was actually right with it. Even the moments that were dangerously close to being interesting were undermined by another element of the performance. All the great acrobatics and martial arts were completed destroyed by the moronic elements to the show. Like the crotch-scratching Monkey and the tone-deaf Pigsy.

The music was puerile, childish and silly. It was a cliched version of what Chinese music should be - if you have got your understanding of Chinese music from terrible, second rate Western cartoons. The lyrics, in keeping with the source material, were in Chinese - and the subtitles were projected onto the canvass on either side of the stage. Creating a problem whereby if you wanted to understand what people were singing, then you had to look away from the stage. And the subtitles were also just crude PowerPoint presentations - something that became very clear when their computer had a moment and the character on stage suddenly started to sing (according to the subtitles) "Click to add title." Mind you, given the calibre of the rest of the lyrics, that might be what they were singing. The lyrics were the very definition of trite and shite. Seriously, they were stomach-churning and facile. They made the average Girls Aloud song sound like Joy Division.

And the characters were dreadful - if you can actually call them characters. They had all the depth of a half-empty paddling pool. Take the lead (and best developed) character - Monkey. In the old TV show, the nature of Monkey was irrepressible. In this show, the nature of Monkey was intensely irritating. The performer playing Monkey seemed to assume that everyone would find his character charming; the reality is that his character was less Monkey and more Ratboy. His constant scratching of his crotch, for example, was less showing a carefree and irrepressible character and instead came across as a character with a bad STD.

Finally, the animation was just crap. It looked, stylistically, like an episode of ThunderCats. And the detail of the drawings would only really be acceptable if it had been done by someone in a nursery. For blind children. With no arms. Seriously, if you took that sort of animation to, say, Walt Disney, he would have not just thrown you out of his office, but also have cut your face for good measure. It really was that bad.

The whole show came across as being created by media darlings with grossly inflated egos effectively masturbating in public over how great they think they are. I'd imagine that the creative "geniuses" behind this sorry shower of shite were surrounded by yes men telling them how great this patronising pile of crap was. Whereas what they need was someone to call them dickheads and tell them to shut the fuck up.

Throughout the whole thing I was thinking of Nathan Barley. That is what is felt like - two twats who managed to convince themselves that they have far more talent than they actually have. In retrospect, it is a lot to expect a second-rate artist and the author of a couple of half-decent 3 minute pop songs to come up with a spectacular operatic version of a myth. It is also astoundingly arrogant of them to think that they could actually achieve such a spectacular. And Monkey: Journey to the West stands as a stunning rebuke to that astounding arrogance. They tired to create an opera from a classic piece of writing. And, boy, did they fail.

*I'd never been to the O2 before. Now I have, let me say this about it; it is an execrable abortion of a structure - a testament to just how shoddy, unimaginative and limited human beings can be sometimes. And in all honesty, it is the perfect testament to the Labour government that built it.