It is not just the brilliant story that makes Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book one of the nation’s most treasured texts.

It is also the writer’s ability to transport you to the colonial India where he grew up.

Neal Foster of the Birmingham Stage Company, who first revived the book for stage in 2004, is the man behind the company’s fourth production of the novel. He says that people who see his version will be taken on a journey to the East.

“The big test for any production is do we take you into the world we are creating on stage?

“If people in Brighton see it and feel that for two hours they’ve stayed in Brighton then we’ve failed.

“The whole object is to take people on a journey into the jungle with Mowgli and his friends. We want to take them along with the adventure then deposit them back into their seats at the end so they go, ‘Wow, I really went somewhere’.”

It sounds like a challenge and many would have shuddered at the thought of even trying to produce a stage adaptation of the book at all.

Disney’s hugely successful 1967 film version has shaped many people’s understanding more than Kipling has himself.

“The only reason it hasn’t been done a lot is because people are frightened. I was certainly warned off it because people might come expecting to hear the same songs and have certain expectations about what it should be.”

The Birmingham Stage Company version is in two halves. The second half begins where the Disney film ended, when Mowgli arrives in the man village.

Their production is much closerto Kipling’s original work but refrains from overly using his often archaic text.

“Disney created a fantastic film and they changed it in a brilliant way and made it fun and exciting. Stuart [Paterson, who wrote the original stage adaptation] has managed to keep the fun and the drama but at the same time bring us back to the book as the beginning.

“Other producers who have done The Jungle Book have made the mistake of almost being too faithful to the style and language of the book and you end up with something quite stiff because it is quite a difficult read.

“It was about taking what worked from the book and acknowledging what it is about the film that people loved so much.

“Ours is the broader story Kipling wrote with the fun side of Disney.”

Composer BB Cooper has created a new score of songs for Foster’s version, which was one way to find solutions to the problems other producers had been talking about.

“They are not the Disney songs but they are in that spirit and work exceptionally well,” says Foster. “There had to be songs.”

The company specialises in children’s theatre but also classics: they have just returned from Syria where they performed their version of Twelfth Night.

Foster says it is the company’s range that makes their work successful.

“Any good piece of theatre has to appeal to all age ranges otherwise you have failed. That’s what we have tried to do.

“This is a real family show; it’s a great musical show. The last number is as good as anything in the West End and we have Peter Elliot, a West End choreographer, doing all the animal movement.

“He created the gorillas from Gorillas In The Mist and Congo and is basically the top man in Hollywood for animal movement.”