Hazards of live theatre aside, it's an uninspired staging of what should be an urgent play for today.
Even if the tension flags a bit in the second act, this remains an urgent play that has the courage to address big issues: above all, the need to retain our idealism in a world where ideology is suspect, religion tarnished and the free market wholly discredited.
But the jungle is an urban one (as Les Tambours du Bronx's score makes clear) and the remote, almost Zen-like refinement of certain passages, the urgent play of cross rhythms concentrated into others transcend any crude pastiche of tribal dance.
Playing on that sensation and abstracting it into the hallicinatory is director Hiroshi Kondo's film Eye Know, accompanied by by Ayako Taniguchi's urgent piano playing.
Urgent strings played Eleanor Rigby line at double speed, a bassoon was used as percussive counterpoint.
And the push towards the final beatific vision was superbly judged – slow yet urgent, beautifully played, the textural layering ravishingly done.
There's nothing to match that here, cinematographer Danny Cohen's urgent bike footage playing second fiddle to the behind-the-scenes action in the hospital rooms, training centres, and mobile blood transfusion units where the dirty deeds were done.
From the first, on his 1948 debut recordings with Smith, Papa's Boogie and Notoriety Woman, he showed his admiration for the urgent singing and playing style of Williamson, homage he continued to pay on Hello Miss Jessie Lee (1952), a reworking of Williamson's signature piece Good Morning Little School Girl, and on numerous later recordings.
There is a more urgent act of submission at play when Reynolds agrees to eat this buttery creation, but it would be giving away too much to describe it in full.
