Decouflé stages Murakami's 'End of the World' at Barbican — SkimNews
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- Philippe Decouflé directed and choreographed the Barbican stage adaptation of Haruki Murakami's 1985 novel "End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland," with Ako Takahashi credited as adaptor
- Tatsuya Fujiwara plays protagonist Watashi in two parallel strands — one set in noirish Tokyo, the other in a dream world where humans are sundered from their shadows
- The near-three-hour production features set design by K Ishihara and brings Murakami's creatures to life, including porcupine-spiked underground "murks" who flip and cartwheel, and a herd of balletic unicorns
- Supporting cast includes Narushi Ikeda as a professor who collects animal skulls to channel past experiences through sound, Miu Tomita as his 17-year-old granddaughter, and Misato Morita as a librarian with whom Watashi has a romance
- The reviewer notes the first half is deliberately disorienting, but after the interval the dance becomes imbued with feeling, revealing themes of loneliness, grief, fear of disappearing, and death
- The story of lost shadows is read as carrying contemporary socio-political echoes about technology, AI, and false selves — and the reviewer compares the dream society's sinister perfectionism to postwar Japan and to Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"
- Decouflé's choreography is described as unsurpassable in elastic grace and athleticism, with dance that gestures at anime and a playful set that cheekily displays its own theatrical construction
Why it matters: Murakami's 1985 novel is widely considered unstageable, and this Barbican production by Decouflé represents a high-profile, near three-hour attempt to translate one of his most structurally complex works into live performance — a notable event for both theatregoers and the international Murakami adaptation market, with a London run that could set the bar for future stagings.
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