Shrimp faces up to the lion

Wole Soyinka wrote this most African of plays while working as a dramaturg at the Royal Court in 1958-59. Perhaps it was toiling away in the bowels of Sloane Square that gave him the idea of playing off his native Nigerian culture against encroaching Western mores.

He was only 23 when he produced this, one of his most popular works - that precocious talent has thus earned him a place in the Barbican's Young Genius season - and he fulfilled that early promise by going on to be the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1986.

No doubt his talent for bridging the divide between diverse cultures is partly why he was so awarded. The Lion and the Jewel certainly contains the universals of human nature - vanity, ambition, cunning and lust - that might be found in a Yoruban village or a Yorkshire hamlet.

Caught between the demands of Africa and the West, tradition and modernity, is local glamour girl Sidi (Omonor Imobhio all wide eyes and haughty pouts), who has had her head turned by posing for a glossy magazine. The village chief (the lion) is suddenly eyeing her up as the latest jewel to add to his crown of women, but so is the village's modern teacher.

Anthony Ofoegbu's tutor is a geek in an ill-fitting suit, ridiculously longing for cocktails, ballroom dancing and afternoon tea. No wonder Sidi calls him a "book-nourished shrimp".

The chief, played by Toyin Oshinaike, is a wily campaigner - a mimed flashback scene reveals him bribing the railway men to move the track away
from the village so he can maintain his feudal hold.

The story is simple enough. What makes Chuck Mike's production so vivid is the exuberance of the ensemble work: the percussion, drumming, mime and dancing, the batik-swathed limbs and hips of the women gyrating gracefully, the soaring chorus of voices.

It captures a freshness and earthiness that recalls Chaucer: a good yarn told with a nudge, a wink and a knowing smile.

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The Lion And The Jewel