The creators of this stage production have taken Makoto Shinkai’s delicate, subtle 46-minute Japanese anime about two lonely people and turned it into something galumphingly obvious and more than twice as long. Though moments of beauty peep through, Alexandra Rutter’s production doesn’t really work as a tribute to the 2013 film or as a piece of theatre in its own right.
It’s a story of wounded souls, poetry and unrequited love, with a side order of foot fetishism. Teenage student Takao (Hiroki Berrecloth) and twentysomething teacher Yukari (Aki Nakagawa) find themselves sheltering from the summer rains most mornings in a public Tokyo garden. He’s skipping school to design shoes: she’s blotting out a professional scandal with beer and chocolate. He gets to measure her feet before he learns her name.
Events that are unstated or slowly revealed in the film are explained upfront here in cartoonish detail. Takao’s unhappy home life is like a sitcom, high school a nightmare of overblown emotion and sexual tension.
Rutter adapted the story with Susan Momoko Hingley, who also plays Takao’s feckless mum. They apparently decided the best way to express Shinkai’s languid, bittersweet tale was through countless short, choppy scenes and self-conscious staginess.
The actors alternate between OTT declamation and meaningful staring into the middle distance. That’s when they are not endlessly, fussily rearranging the set. There’s some expressive movement and a puppet bird representing freedom, which are both frankly embarrassing. Berrecloth is charmingly awkward, while Nakagawa is blankly enigmatic: neither is required to do much else.
Mark Choi’s score is overbearing. The video designs of cityscapes and superimposed poetry are impressive, but also an attempt to do in a theatre something that has been better done – and will always be better done – on screen.
Hingley says in the programme that anime-to-stage shows have been big in Japan for years. They’re suddenly big here, with the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro back soon at the Barbican and the Tokyo staging of his film Spirited Away coming to the Coliseum.
It’s part of a wider trend: art forms have always borrowed or stolen from each other, but the multi-genre exploitation of established intellectual property now happens on an industrial scale. This mid-level misfire isn’t on the level of, say, the Cats film. But it illustrates the same point. Sure, you can adapt an understated cult anime for the stage: but consider whether you should.
