Theatre - Colin Teevan on how to get an ancient myth out of a stone egg

I was probably the only child unaware of the Japanese cult TV series Monkey! in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so I initially found the incredulous reaction to my current writing project irritating. Doesn't anyone know that these whimsical, badly post-synched tales of simian sorcery were in fact based on one of the great works of Chinese literature? However, as the project of adapting it for the stage has progressed, these apparent differences between my perceptions of the source myths and the public perception of the TV show have seemed less like contradictions and more like twin aspects of the nature of Monkey. Ultimately, it is this very dual nature that gives the work its charm and, indeed, its themes.

Sun Wu-k'ung, the Monkey of the Mind, was born from a stone egg. While the stories about him date back at least as far as the fifth century and were very popular subjects for plays in the Yuan dynasty, the most complete retelling of his exploits extant is the Hsi-yu Chi, which was first published in 1592. The Hsi-yu Chi - or The Journey to the West, as in Anthony C Yu's masterful four-volume English version - tells how Monkey was banished from the heavens for eating the peaches of eternal life. After 500 years locked in a mountain, he was released and, with the pig monster Pigsy and the sand-eel monster Sandy, accompanied the monk Tripitaka on a journey to the Western Heaven to fetch the scriptures of the laws from Tathagata Buddha. The bulk of the text is taken up with the foursome's 81 adventures on the road to enlightenment.

Arthur Waley, in his introduction to his extensively bowdlerised Penguin translation, Monkey, calls it a "combination of beauty with absurdity, of profundity with nonsense". While the world of bureaucratic heavens, underworlds and fallen monsters might at times seem alien to western readers, Waley misses the serious intentions behind the work and, by random editing, destroys the vast architecture of the piece. Indeed, this work is treated so reverentially in certain Chinese quarters that rituals of hand-washing and prayer must be performed before one may read even a single chapter. The author (now largely believed not to be the Wu Ch'eng-en to whom Waley ascribes the work) seems to have intended a story of mankind: from the egotistical demands of the childish mind (Monkey) through an encounter with the soul (Tripitaka), the appetite (Pigsy) and intuition (Sandy), to achievement of the self. Pilgrims learn that all creatures must be true to their nature, but that enlightenment comes only when one learns the dual quality of that nature.

The author of The Journey to the West was sponsored by the Ming dynasty, and there is an obvious political and religious argument behind the book. The Taoist Tripitaka was a historical character in the T'ang dynasty in the sixth century. He travelled to the source of Buddhism in the Hindu Kush to obtain core Buddhist texts, in the original language, that the T'ang emperor might use to unify competing religious factions in his empire. By sponsoring the collation of the Monkey and Tripitaka stories, one Ming emperor of the 16th century obviously sought an instrument to unify the religions of his times.

All this might appear rather earnest material for a Christmas show. But it is the genius of the original author that he created in Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and Tripitaka characters of such wit, humour, magic and empathy that we are endlessly amused by their scrapes and moved by their gradual progress towards enlightenment. As a group of characters, they resemble Dorothy and her travelling companions from The Wizard of Oz more than anything from classical western mythology.

Yet our stage version is not another Disneyfication of an ancient myth. Monkey is as irreverent as he is ingenious, and this is a work of satire and sutras, enlightenment and aerial kung fu, but never absurdity and nonsense.

Monkey: a tale from China is at the Young Vic Theatre, London SE1 (020 7928 6363), until 19 January 2002

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