Theatre review: Spirited Away

All of a sudden London theatre seems to have cottoned on to the popularity of East Asian culture, so in the coming months we've got the return of Totoro, new musicals with Korean and Manga roots, and first up another adaptation of a beloved Studio Ghibli film. Spirited Away comes to the Coliseum in John Caird's original Tokyo production, in Japanese with surtitles. Like many a Hayao Miyazaki story it begins with a child nervous about moving to a new home: Chihiro's (Momoko Fukuchi, alternating with Kanna Hashimoto, Mone Kamishiraishi and Rina Kawaei) family are driving to a new town when they stop off to check out an ancient building. Once inside they find a market full of food stalls but nobody manning them, so Chihiro's parents help themselves, promising to pay once somebody arrives. But as night falls the market will transform into a place for 8 million gods to congregate in, and as fairytale logic applies the parents will be transformed into pigs for their gluttony.

Chihiro meets Haku (Kaito Arai, alternating with Kotaro Daigo, Hiroki Miura and Atsuki Mashiko,) a Non-Threatening Boy^TM who is actually a dragon and is also actually a river, who tells her she can get her parents back, but first she has to... actually she just has to hang around for a bit and with any luck a plot will eventually transpire.

So she takes a job at the magical bathhouse run by the witch Yubaba (Romi Park, alternating with Mari Natsuki and Hitomi Harukaze,) where after a number of big setpieces she finally gets given the chance to save her parents and flee the realm, by taming the demon No Face (Hikaru Yamano) and fixing the mischief caused by Yubaba's identical twin sister Zeniba, who has never been mentioned before she turns up quite late in the story to cause havoc. Now I'm not going to go so far as to say this made anything like linear sense in the original film, but Caird and Maoko Imai's stage adaptation does expose the way the story mashes up fairytale tropes in fairly haphazard fashion.

This is a very faithful adaptation of the story and look of the animation, but it's also a full hour longer, much more than can be accounted for by the interval, so the slower storytelling might be why it's not quite as easy to get swept up in everything that's going on without questioning the fact that nothing makes sense (not even fairytale sense.) I ended up feeling decidedly mixed about Spirited Away: The emphasis is firmly on spectacle and recreating the movie's famous setpieces, which the show is successful at - but as the main stage is taken up by Jon Bausor's set spectacularly recreating the wooden magical village, a lot of the action in Caird's production gets pushed down to the apron over the orchestra pit. So actually being able to see what's going on from the Balcony is a challenge at times, which probably doesn't help if you want to get lost in the story and not be distracted by trying to make sense of it.

But if I found the overall effect a little cold, many individual elements are full of charm, especially in the stagecraft used: The puppeteering of the flying creatures is graceful, and I especially liked the way the puppet Haku gets seamlessly swapped out for smaller ones to show him disappearing into the distance. The frog Aogaeru (Seiya Motoki, alternating with Obata no Oniisan,) is a fast audience favourite.

Borrowing from traditional Japanese theatre styles the puppeteers are all clearly visible, leading to a lot of fun animating the arms of the spider-like Kamaji (Tomorowo Taguchi, alternating with Satoshi Hashimoto and Tomu Miyazaki.) One character who couldn't be literally translated to the stage is Kashira, who consists of three huge disembodied heads, so instead we have a bit of quirky creative staging as Yuya Igarashi plays him as a half-naked man with an extra head on the end of each arm.

Yamano's physicality as No-Face is another highlight as the ghost-like creature creeps, darts and skitters around the stage, although the sequence of the spirit's train journey with Chihiro drags on a bit, as if Caird is fully aware he's recreating the most iconic image in all of Ghibli and is milking the moment. But Joe Hisaishi's music, again straight from the film, comes closest to helping the audience get completely lost in the surreal spirit world. Built on spectacle, this does leave those of us up in the gods a bit short-changed in this venue, and the whole doesn't perhaps add up to the same charm as its individual parts, but there's still a lot to enjoy here. Now do Whisper of the Heart.

Spirited Away by John Caird and Maoko Imai, based on the film by Hayao Miyazai, is booking until the 24th of August at the London Coliseum.

Running time: 3 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.