Theatre - A new vampire musical is a bloody mess, writes Michael Portillo Bat Boy Shaftesbury Theatre, London WC2

Edgar is, in the modern jargon, a young male with a challenging behavioural condition. While he has impeccable manners and beautiful diction, he gets no satisfaction from cooked food. He can derive nourishment only from fresh flowing blood, whether from rats, rabbits, cows or, worst of all, human beings. It is not his fault, given his upbringing. He was found living like an animal in a cave, but being half bat, his fangs proved handy for survival in the wild. The question (posed not very seriously) in Laurence O'Keefe's musical Bat Boy is whether, having taken the boy out of the cave, you can ever take the cave out of the boy.

Given his difficult child-hood but undeniably unconventional proclivities, the lad has his defenders and his detractors. The action is set in Hope Falls, West Virginia, a few decades ago. As you would expect, there is an ugly collection of brutish farmers and hillbillies with politically incorrect views about juvenile vampirism. They raise absurdly unenlightened and selfish objections to his tendency to slaughter their cattle, and they bellyache in a redneck kind of way just because there is a teenage girl in the village languishing deliriously - the side effect of a bat bite that will not heal.

The forces of light are represented by much lovelier-looking people in the shape of Meredith and Shelley, the wife and daughter of the local vet. Their compassion for Edgar saves him from being put down, and their love draws unimaginable reserves of humanity from the mongrel boy-bat. That is not enough to dispense with the difficulty that blood-sucking is the sort of nasty habit that is likely to get a youth into bad scrapes, and in any society there are always people just itching to make trouble out of any little personal failing like that.

It would be difficult, and wrong, to give an impression of how bizarrely the plot evolves. Suffice it to say that it goes insanely off the rails. The last scene appears to be a pastiche of the conclusion of Hamlet, where Fortinbras (in this case, a long-awaited man from a research institute) arrives to find a pile of corpses, and the survivors offer to tell him the strange story of what has occurred. This musical has its tongue firmly in its cheek, and is sick in a way that delights adolescents of all ages. I felt that I was either missing the point, or maybe, more depressingly, I was getting the point but it wasn't one worth making.

O'Keefe's music is varied and mainly enjoyable, though often too loud and with too many opportunities in the big numbers for a soprano to shriek rather than sing. The lyrics are quick-witted and amusing. He does not touch greatness, but his work is pretty good. The choruses are lively. The ensemble appears and reappears in a range of guises, men dressed as women and vice versa. Lynne Page's choreography develops during the course of the show, and the cast responds enthusiastically to the material. Chicago-born Maurey Richards is given wonder-ful chances to whip up the audience in his role as the gospel-singing Reverend Billy Hightower.

Deven May has come to the West End having originated the Bat Boy role first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He has been with the musical since its beginning back in 1997. I admire his patience. To say the least, he is well rehearsed, but there is no sign that he has wearied in the part. He still performs with tremendous energy as he progresses from wordless savage creature to highly articulate young gentleman. With his charming smile distorted by blood-sucking fangs and his good looks compromised by bat ears, he wins first our pity and then our empathy. Without what you would call an athletic build, he swings gymnastically from bough to branch, though perhaps recalling Tarzan more than a bat.

Emma Williams supplies the love interest as Shelley, and she and May have their "beauty and the beast in the woods" moment as they engage in a chubby nude scene, which must be one of the least erotic things recently mounted on the West End stage.

Top marks go to Rebecca Vere as Meredith. She has a lovely singing voice, and gives a fine performance evolving from the model 1950s home-maker into a liberated woman, calculatedly bestowing and withholding her sexual fa-vours, and eventually defying public opinion to throw off her chains.

Mark Wing-Davey directs a slick production that is propelled crisply from one scene to the next by a superb stage design from Madeline Herbert.

I went on a Tuesday night and found myself sitting among a very small scattering of people in the stalls. Most of them not merely clapped but whooped after every song, and once the show had clunked towards its anarchic conclusion, they were on their feet cheering. Bat Boy clearly has a cult following. Sad to report, I am not part of it.

Booking on 020 7379 5399 until 30 October

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