Review: SPUTNIK SWEETHEART, Arcola Theatre

Another trip to Murakamiland, that familiar but strange place, populated by people who can’t seem to connect, fall in love badly and insist on encountering cats that may or may not be real. I first ventured into this terrain reading short stories in the New Yorker a couple of decades ago when they felt more related to magical realism, but the world, like cinema, has caught up with his visions of pervasive alienation and, with this, the Second Stage adaptation I’ve seen in the last few months, theatre has now too.

Sumire is a writer, drifting through life, unable to get a novel published, unable to work more conventionally and never venturing out of the Friend Zone. That’s bad news for K, a teacher who is smitten by her and whom she relies on for industrial quantities of self-esteem boosting and mansplaining. Until she meets Miu, an older, more sophisticated woman with a mysterious past and a lucrative business importing wine from Europe. Cue a parallel relationship, the infatuation this time harboured by Sumire and the sexual indifference held by Miu.

Bryony Lavery’s adaptation takes a while to get going - as so often with this writer, it’s the cat that acts as the er… catalyst for the plot to take off, but, with director, Melly Still, interpolating movement and dance into its 80 minutes all-through runtime, it never quite stalls. Sonoko Obuchi’s monochrome animations also add both narrative drive and an explicitly Japanese dimension to the play, beautiful to behold.

Naruto Komatsu has the difficult job of convincing us that K is neither an idiot (though nobody who has suffered unrequited love for any length of time will think that) nor an irritating know-all and he just about manages that. Natsumi Kuroda’s Miu is presented as an ice queen, but she softens when she speaks of the dreamy trauma that peeled off half of her personhood, the cathartic waking nightmare that locks her in an emotional prison.

Millicent Wong gives the most compelling performance as Sumire, girlishly enthusiastic one moment, distressed the next. Appallingly selfish in her exploitation of her would-be lover with her regular 3am phonecalls, but aching with lonely desire simultaneously, she invites both disdain and sympathy, never at ease anywhere, always standing on the brink of self-sabotage. 

As an introduction to Haruki Murakami’s works, the play may be a little baffling, a little unanchored, too abstract to hold on to as it slides in and out of psychological and physical spaces, but long-time admirers will recognise that price and pay it happily. To be fully realised, one feels that Shizuka Hariu’s minimalist design (a sort of spinning telephone box is put to a number of uses on a bare stage) might be expanded and the first thirty minutes condensed, but the play is, nevertheless, a welcome addition to growing interest in a writer who will surely win the Nobel Prize soon. 

At which point, expect to see more such explorations of Murakamiland in London and elsewhere.    

Sputnik Sweetheart at the Arcola Theatre until 25 November     

Photo Credits: Alex Brenner

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