Decouflé stages Murakami epic at the Barbican — SkimNews
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- Philippe Decouflé directed and choreographed the Barbican stage adaptation of Haruki Murakami's 'End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland,' filling the vast stage with dream worlds for Ako Takahashi's adaptation of the 1985 novel.
- Tatsuya Fujiwara plays two versions of protagonist Watashi — one in noirish Tokyo, the other in a dream world where humans are sundered from their shadows, accompanied by a librarian (Misato Morita) with whom he has a romance.
- Narushi Ikeda plays a professor who collects animal skulls to channel past experiences through sound, while Miu Tomita plays his 17-year-old granddaughter who accompanies Watashi through Tokyo like a kitsch prophetess alongside Aeneas.
- Decouflé's choreography brought Murakami's creatures to life visually, from underground porcupine-spiked 'murks' who flip and cartwheel to a herd of balletic unicorns, with set design by K Ishihara and references to Lewis Carroll, Luis Buñuel, and The Matrix.
- The story's lost shadows representing the 'true' self carry socio-political echoes the reviewer links to postwar Japan's perfectionism and to contemporary anxieties about AI, real and fake selves, and machine-constructed subjectivity, citing Naomi Klein's 'Doppelganger.'
- At almost three hours, the production deploys 'controlled and deliberate confusion' reflecting Watashi's state of mind, with the second half revealing underlying themes of loneliness, grief, and fear of disappearing and death.
Why it matters: Decouflé's production demonstrates that a 1985 novel about sundered shadows and lost identity can land as a prescient commentary on contemporary AI-era authenticity. By staging Murakami's two-narrative complexity as visual immersion rather than linear plot, the Barbican adapts one of the author's most structurally demanding works for theater audiences who may otherwise find the novel impenetrable.
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