Tatsuo (Dai Tabuchi) moves his family from Tokyo to a small village, to be with his wife Yasuko (Haruka Abe,) who's in a countryside hospital being treated for Period Drama Cough. 10-year-old Satsuki (Ami Okumura Jones) has school to keep her busy, but 4-year-old Mei (Mei Mac) is looked after in the day by a neighbour they call Granny (Jacqueline Tate.)
Mei finds it easy to escape Granny and run away into the forest, where she encounters various supernatural creatures, her favourite being Totoro - implied to be the nature spirit that protects the wood, for some reason he takes the form of an enormous fluffy monster who bounces along like an oversized space hopper. When Yasuko's health deteriorates, Mei disappears again, and humans and supernatural creatures alike set out to find her. And, apart from a subplot where her classmate Kanta (Nino Furuhata) develops a crush on Satsuki, that's about it as far as the story goes.
What Phelim McDermott's production revels in instead is creating wonder through sounds and visuals: Joe Hisaishi adapts his original score, including songs sung live and to atmospheric effect by Ai Ninomiya. Tom Pye's set makes full use of the Barbican stage to give us haunted houses and vast forests, Kimie Nakano's costumes are authentically cartoonish, but inevitably the design stars are Basil Twist's puppets, operated by an army of puppeteers. They create everything from the Soot Sprites that haunt the house (Miyazaki tapping into a very Japanese folklore tradition that you shouldn't leave an inaninmate object unattended for too long or it might get possessed,) to Kanta's chickens, which very much follow in the scene-stealing tradition of War Horse's goose.
The way Totoro, the mini-Totoros and Catbus are brought to life are closely-guarded secrets of the production so I won't go into them too much, except to say they reliably provide the "wow" moments they're intended to: In his first appearance, Totoro's tongue might as well be a character in its own right, and although the production does have an identity of its own, the puppetry does make an effort to emulate much of the movement from the film, recreating the way Totoro is somehow as eerie as he is lovable: The floaty, bouncy way of walking, the simultaneously sinister and friendly grin.
An almost three-hour play is a bit of a stretch from an 85-minute film, and although there's enough to keep nostalgic adults happy for that time I do wonder if it might be pushing it for younger kids. But McDermott's production does push the theatrical magic as well as that in the story in a way that should let any audience feel invited in: For the puppeteers, there's a nod to the Kabuki tradition of stagehands all in black being "invisible," but it's played with in a running gag where they keep finding themselves "visible" at the wrong time. It keeps the interest going by creating wonder in both the creatures, and the way they're brought to life. With a gentle nod to Miyazaki's environmental concerns to complete the feel of Ghibli brought to life, you can sense how close this could come to being cutesy and insufferable, but it invariably swings to the charming instead, making it a successful attempt to stage the unstageable. Now do Spirited Away.
My Neighbour Totoro by Tom Morton-Smith, based on the film by Hayao Miyazaki, is booking until the 21st of January at the Barbican Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: RSC/Nippon TV/Manuel Harlan.
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