Theatre review: Death Note

It's been a much-loved manga and a much-loathed film, now Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note becomes a dynamic, tragicomic stage show. Frank Wildhorn (music,) Ivan Menchell (book) and Jack Murphy's (lyrics) musical adaptation debuted in Japan in 2015 and has had a concert production in London before, but Stephen Whitson's production now gives the fully-staged treatment to the story of a very right-wing teenager who gets to live out his fantasies of being judge, jury and executioner: When Ryuk (Telly Leung,) a Shinigami - a chaotic death god - gets bored of handing out death sentences to random humans, he deliberately misplaces his magic book in the mortal world to see who will pick it up. The Death Note ends up in the hands of Light Yagami (Xander Pang,) a schoolboy with an alarmingly right-wing attitude towards social justice.

The Death Note comes with instructions that if Light writes a person's full name in the book while thinking of their face, they will die of a heart attack 40 second later. He tries it out on a man holding a primary school class hostage, and soon becomes the invisible vigilante Kira, killing off criminals he doesn't think have been punished enough.

As power goes to Light's head and he starts taking down the police team trying to catch him, led by his own father (Paolo Montalban,) the equally mysterious private detective known only as L (Colin Ryan) is put on the case, and the race is on to discover each other's true identity. Meanwhile two other Shinigami, Grace Mouat's Rem and Chloe Saracco's Gelus, become dangerously obsessed with pop star Misa Misa (Stephanie Zaharis,) who has her own connection to Kira.

With the Valjean/Javert pairing at its centre - if Valjean was less Grand Theft Baked Goods, more Power-Crazed Serial Killer - this initially unlikely-sounding source material makes sense as a musical, and Wildhorn's catchy music quickly passes the test of "will I seek out a cast recording?" There's actually a lot of songs, but except when the second act overburdens Zaharis with earnest ballads, they rarely feel like they're slowing down the action. It keeps Whitson's production propulsive, and for all that it's been touted as a big technical spectacular it relies mostly on pure theatre, with the huge square catwalk that dominates the stage feeling like a real signature look from designer Jon Bausor.

The cast throwing themselves into the action doesn’t hurt, and the touches of comedy help keep the story from getting too bleak – there’s great comic moments from Leung’s bitchy, apple-addicted demon and Ryan’s neurospicy genius, and having seen the latter on stage many times but rarely anywhere near a musical it’s a pleasant surprise to have him deliver some of the show’s standout vocals. And the show maintains enough Japanese roots without feeling like exoticising them – there’s something very purely Japanese about even demons of random death being defined by very specific rules. There’s a dramatic dénouement even if the second act does drag out a bit getting to it, especially as the show’s a good twenty minutes longer than advertised in the email they sent out earlier in the day*, but overall Death Note hits its mark more often than not.

Death Note by Frank Wildhorn, Jack Murphy and Ivan Menchell, based on the manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, is booking until the 12th of September at the Barbican Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*people use this information to organise their journeys home, I really don’t understand what’s so confusing about this