Spirited Away at the London Coliseum — a fan-pleasing stage adaptation with a few surprises
For many in the audience, expectations were so high for the latest Studio Ghibli film turned stage adaptation, Spirited Away, that seeing it faithfully recreated in the ornate chamber of London’s Coliseum was more of a relief than a spectacle.
The original film is significant for both the famed animation house and its viewers for a number of reasons. Though the studio had already become ubiquitous in its native territory of Japan from director Hayao Miyazaki’s early masterpieces, Spirited Away was the first of their films to infiltrate the tentative western market. It would be the first non-English film to win an Oscar in the Best Animation category, and for many it is a safe choice for one of the greatest animated films of all time, decades on — perhaps only in competition with the studio’s other films.
Mix this renown with the attachment that many fans have for it, and you might wonder if a stage production could ever stand on its own feet. Or replicate the colour, kineticism and downright strangeness of the painstakingly hand-drawn animated film.
I think the answer is yes to both, even if these conditions are contradictory. Whether or not you are endeared to this visual banquet, there is nary a dull moment in its almost three hour run-time.
From the moment her family decides to explore a moss-strewn tunnel to an abandoned theme-park, a cantankerous ten-year-old girl, Chihiro, finds herself tipped into a lucid reality of gods and spirits. In a touch of Miyazaki brilliance, these otherworldly inhabitants enjoy spending their downtime in a traditional bath house. As Chihiro embraces servitude into this business to save her cursed parents, the viewer is transported into a world so vibrant and absurd that it could have come out straight off of a yokai print. Not merely a hallucinogenic tale, Spirited Away explores perennial Ghibli themes such as the environment, greed, and the conflict between tradition and modernity.
Thanks to some inventive costume and puppetry design by Toby Olié, all of Ghibli’s strange creatures are more or less realised. For many, I imagine, there was anticipation about how a certain moment or effect would be produced, whether that was the witch Yubaba’s transformation into a surveying crow, Haku’s twirling dragon, or the spirit No Face’s monstrous growth in size — and all were convincing. With the exception of the lumbering Radish Spirit, here something of a walking potato sack, most non-human characters were recreated with malleable puppetry, loose fabrics and tight choreography. At some points it began to look like an interpretive dance piece, and these moments possibly crowded the story beats.
Still, as a marriage between British and Japanese creatives (the stage adaptor, John Caird, is also married to co-adaptor Maoko Imai), the production feels at home in London’s Coliseum, even having debuted in Japan in 2022. Impressively, the Japanese cast has been brought over to this production almost wholesale, with screens translating their dialogue real-time for English audiences. The core appeal of the story has thankfully not been lost in the process. The only problem is you might be torn between reading and catching all of the details on stage — but at least there’s no cheesy American cast dub.
Aside from reliable renditions of the main characters, Chihiro, Lin, and Haku, whose roles are being rotated between actors, it is probably the more outlandish performances that will stick in the minds of audiences. By leaning on some gleefully madcap physical comedy, this production may actually be funnier than the film. Resuming her role from the film’s original cast, Mari Natsuki is demented as the witch and bath house chief Yubaba — it’s great to see her hair come loose from the stress of pacifying her giant baby. Other clear winners are the synchronised triad of disembodied heads she keeps as pets (Yuya Igarashi), and, fans will be pleased to know, the spider-crab-like boiler keeper Kamaji — with fully extendable arms (!), and his begrudging words of encouragement for our heroine.
It wouldn’t be a big-budget theatre production if it didn’t have a rotating, modular set, but thankfully Jon Basuar’s Kabuki-inspired design here is neither under or over-exploited. With deft transitions, we go from the exterior and elaborate interiors of the bath house, with all of its many levels, from Yubaba’s roof, to the servant dorms, and Kamaji’s boiler room full of hobbling soot sprites. Only, things can get muddled in the transitions, as Miyazaki’s pinpoint architectural details are rendered somewhat abstractly on stage.
Though the dialogue is very faithful to the film, it doesn’t prevent the actors from bringing their own flourishes to their roles. The amorphous, unnervingly masked ghoul No Face (Hikaru Yamano) moves so fluidly it’s easy to forget there are a pair of legs somewhere under there. He manages to elicit the mixture of pity, laughter and fear that makes the character iconic, and I was reminded that No Face’s unexpectedly nuanced subplot carries the story. Only with Studio Ghibli do we get a faceless horror who ends up finding a passion for knitting.
Yet it’s not so much the individual performances as the ensemble cast — an intricate and chameleonic workforce — that keep everything together. Rest assured, if you lose track of what is going on you can at least enjoy the tightly sequenced manoeuvres of panel doors and puppets, fabrics and masks. Strong dancing was pretty much a prerequisite for this show, but in a pleasant addition we also get moments of reflective song. To round things off, all is accompanied by a reworked Joe Hisashi orchestral score performed live beneath the stage, opera style.
As with My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican, British theatre audiences have proved themselves to be clamouring for any taste of Ghibli. While that production adopted a relatively slow and simple story, Spirited Away is all monsters and muscle, and never really lets up for its duration. Well, aside from the last few scenes, whose slightly ridiculous revelations are more excusable in the film.
Aside from the obvious possibility of further Ghibli adaptations (my bet’s on Ponyo for the next one), the success of these shows ignite a faint hope for the appearance of more Japanese theatre on British stages.
Then again, they could be outliers. Miyazaki himself was curious, and perhaps a bit sceptical, to how his darling Spirited Away could be pulled off when originally approached by the show’s director, John Caird. His response: ‘But how … how on earth will you do it?’ will be the same one on many a fan’s lips. Let’s just say that for all of the wizardry that goes into Ghibli’s films this group of creatives and performers have a few tricks of their own. These are names you don’t want to forget.
