Review: END OF THE WORLD AND HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND, Barbican Theatre

Murakamiworld feels recognisable - not real, but definitely ‘a thing’. It’s somewhere on the edge of our world, sometimes floating into it, but sometimes floating away. Its inhabitants never quite know where they are either, whether sitting alone in one of hundreds of identical hotel rooms in a concrete block, chasing cats that do seem comfortable and at ease, or, as in this play, tapping skulls to hear sounds that may, or may not, be stored dreams.

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland was published in 1985, years before The New Yorker printed many of Murakami’s short stories. It also predates the stories that inspired a run of superb films in the last ten years (Burning, Drive My Car and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman). It is more avant garde, more postmodernist, dare I say, in its structure - perhaps the writer mellowed as success arrived. 

Adapted for the stage by Ako Takahashi, directed and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé, this production leans further into that disorienting strangeness to make an international theatrical epic. Two parallel stories run side by side, occasionally touching each other and resolving - well, as much as any Murakami work does - by the end. 

We open on a Japanese warrior with a horn that is bigger than he is, surrounded by unicorns, ballet dancers en pointe making a remarkable facsimile of the mythical creatures. Already the production’s strongest suit is clear - it is ravishing to look at, the movement is beautiful and the sets, on this largest of stages, somehow both vast when evoking a fantasy landscape and intimate when excavating the anomie of city life. It’s rare for this reviewer to highlight these roles, but set designer K Ishihara,  lighting designer Yukiko Yoshimoto, sound designer Masahiro Inoue and video designer Taiki Ueda really are the stars of the show, metaphorically if not literally.

The storytelling is harder to warm to. My usual ploy with Murakami is to let the narrative come to me. Don’t go looking for linear progression, do not think everyone is exactly as they seem and do not trust even the most benign of personalities. 

This problem of what we can believe about people, even ourselves, is exemplified by the warrior’s cleaving of the shadow from the man, leaving both mortally wounded in an imagined walled city of emotion-free contentment - Stepford wives and Stepford husbands - surrounded by a hostile landscape that kills the unicorns and the humans who venture out too far for too long.

Meanwhile, in the parallel storyline, a Calcutec, a kind of human encrypter, is pursued by Semiotecs, a gangsterish organisation who want the data inside his head, He has a half-hearted affair with a librarian, but knows that his life is in danger as he is sucked further and further into his deep psyche and that land of isolation and unicorns.

The science fiction element draws on some of the obsessions of Philip K Dick and the slippery nature of memory and its fantasy landscapes suggests some of Jorge Luis Borges’ tales, but both those writers were much clearer and pacier in their plotting. This adaptation (almost three hours long) drifts when it could punch and delights in its own existence, almost to the exclusion of us on the other side of the fourth wall.

That said, it is a delight to behold and, thanks to Mayu Gonto’s sublime piano, wonderful to hear too. And it finishes with a real coup de théâtre that sent me into the night to face a disrupted Tube journey home and exactly the sort of resignation to my fate that one of Murakami’s salarymen would feel on the Tokyo Metro.     

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland at Barbican Theatre until 11 October

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