Photo by Manuel Harlan

My Neighbour Totoro adapted by Tom Morton-Smith – Barbican Theatre, London

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s collaboration with Studio Ghibli, and their composer Joe Hisaishi, is a big deal. It breaks new ground, looking unlike anything the company has staged before and entering risky territory. The much-loved 1988 film My Neighbour Totoro has a devoted fanbase who would never forgive a stage show that messed it up. Fortunately the production team is perfect. Writer Tom Morton-Smith delivers a subtle adaptation that respects the film’s character. Phelim McDermott, of Improbable Theatre fame, directs with a very clear sense of why the film is special, while making it stage spectacle. Hisaishi provides a strong thread of authenticity. And designer Tom Pye, with puppet master Basil Twist, delivers a masterclass.

In short, My Neighbour Totoro is a delight. It is also an artistic triumph, a musical and a family show, but without any of the condescension that often implies. It is a beautiful and wistful show, where nothing is rushed and everything feels real, even when it’s a 20ft high furry puppet. The story follow a difficult time in the life of young Satsuki and her sister (“I am FOUR years old”) Mei, who move to the country with their father Tatsuo to be nearer their mother Yasuko, ill in hospital. The girls take consolation from the forest spirits they find in their new, rural home, first an infestation of soot sprites and then Totoro’s smaller sidekicks, and finally Totoro himself, a furry, benevolent owl/bear/cat combination with a huge grin and a giant roar, who helps them in need.

The main challenge of putting the film on theatre is staging Studio Ghibli’s fantastical beings, and this is where the production really shines. A team of puppeteers, dressed in black, manipulate everything from soot sprites to butterflies to a flock of very animated chickens on the end of stiff wires, entrancing the audience every time. They move characters to set, shuffling across the stage tending rows of rice plants, attached to their feet. In a memorable scene they drift around Mei as moving rows of maize as she becomes lost in a field. And then there are the creatures themselves, made by the Jim Henson Creature Shop. Heralded by two smaller friends who scuttle across the set, chased by Mei, Totoro himself is a triumph – first appearing as a vast sleeping yawning mound of fur, and then as a perfect representation of the film’s character, mesmerising the audience with his every grin. And then there’s the Cat Bus, a 12-legged flying cat and bus combination that provides a magical transport service. It glows brightly from within, and looks amazing.

It would be easy to imagine the cast struggling to compete with such wizardry, but their performances give the show its heart. As Satsuki and Mei, Ami Okumura Jones and Mei Mac draw us right in both with their energetic game-playing and their touching attempts to cope with the shadow of their mother’s illness. Mei Mac pulls off the very tough job of playing a young child in a way that does not seem forced. Michael Phong Le, as their father, is the perfect combination of together and lost. The show does not shy away from the story’s darker side, notably during a scene where Mei goes missing and a cast of farmers search a pond with long bamboo canes in a sort of dance, both beautiful and very sad. The upbeat moments are all the more significant for being hard-won, and although the evening does not do easy happy endings, it is filled with the positivity that comes from people looking after one another.

Totoro is already sold out at the Barbican, and must surely be in line for a West End transfer. It thoroughly deserves to run for a long time, providing both delight and essential income in equal measure. Although the RSC’s incoming artistic directors Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans have yet to take the reins, this inspired collaboration feels like the foundation for an exciting new era in Stratford and London.

An Evening Without Kate Bush by Sarah-Louise Young & Russell Lucas – Soho Theatre, London

Sarah-Louise Young is a performer with a distinctive line in one woman shows that combine theatre, comedy and song in subtle and rather innovative ways. The Silent Treatment, her show at the 2022 Edinburgh Festival about her life as a performer was moving, ingenious and entertaining. Her show about Kate Bush wears its accomplishments very lightly, but is unmistakably a very clever show. Performed cabaret style in a late night slot downstairs at the Soho Theatre, where the comedians are usually found, the evening is all about shared enjoyment with the audience.

Sarah-Louise is a big fan of Kate Bush as unsurprisingly, is almost the entire audience, but she is no humourless fan. She performs a perfect fan’s selection of Kate Bush songs, ranging from the obvious (‘Running Up That Hill’) to the obscure (‘James and The Cold Gun’) and the unflashy but essential (‘The Man With the Child in His Eyes’). She is very happy to wield a giant cape-cum-fan for a very amusing dance parodying the ‘Never for Ever’ era, breaking down the classic Bush dance moves. She sings ‘Babooshka’ in Russian as an affronted grandmother, and ‘This Woman’s Work’ in a mop repurposed as a surprisingly effective wig. There is also a very silly impression of Lindsay Kemp. Two couples from the audience are cheerfully integrated into the show, providing backing vocals for ‘Don’t Give Up’ with the ‘boring Peter Gabriel bits’ removed. Young, a seems to particularly enjoy the audience interaction and improvisation that goes with it. However, she takes Kate Bush entirely seriously too, and makes it entirely clear just how exceptional a song-writer and performer she is, easier to parody than to understand. She also weaves in material that, although lightly presented, hits home including a rather shocking account of being shamed by her convent school nuns for performing a Kate Bush song at a school assembly.

Young is a delightful singer, but she doesn’t overdo it. She completely convinces an excited audience by performing the songs in her own way, avoiding Kate Bush impressions, but with teasing glimpses of how she could sing like Bush if she chose. Her range and style makes the music a pleasure, but the show’s climax comes with the song she doesn’t sing. She spends the show building up to ‘Wuthering Heights’ but, when the moment comes, turns the microphone to the audience who sing the entire thing, joyfully and almost entirely accurately. It is a moment of communal connection that has everyone leaving with a smile on their face, and tribute to the simple but highly effective theatricality that Young seems to have at her fingertips.

A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain by Sami Ibrahim – Gate Theatre at 26 Crowndale, London

Published by Plays International

Performed on a bare stage that contains only a trunk and a suitcase as a set, it is immediately clear that Sami Ibrahim’s play is about movement, boundaries, displacement and home. The central character, Elif (Sara Hazemi), seems to lead an existence from a fairytale as a shepherdess, looking after her flock on a nameless island in an unknown time, shearing their fleeces which float up to make the clouds and bring the rain. If this sounds twee, it is not what it seems. Reality barges into Elif’s story, and we discover that she is an illegal immigrant at the mercy of her employer (played by Princess Khumalo), and the life of a shepherdess is poorly paid and brutal. She has come to the island having been forced to leave her mother and her home by war. And then she gets pregnant with her employer’s son (Samuel Tracy) leading her into a struggle for official recognition for her and her daughter, Lily. 

Ibrahim writes in a layered and intriguing style, in which the characters are also narrators, constantly stepping back from the story to question their own and others accounts of what happened, and to challenge their motives. It gives the play a constantly shifting surface in which no-one can settle, reflecting its core theme. Comforting parables come up hard against a Kafka-esque immigration system designed to destroy people systematically over many years. The system is that of the UK. As Lily grows up (with Princess Khumalo in this role too) she rebels as teenagers do and questions her mother’s decisions, leading to conflict. The progress of the story reveals systemic inhumanity in the way we have set up our society and how, “under the same sky” as Ibrahim puts it, people have no rights, status or respect.

The way we treat refugees is an urgent political question, and the play’s focus is powerful. However, its combination of politics and quirky fairytale is not a complete success. Elif defends her daughter and herself from reality through stories. They put her in control, making the weather, releasing pigeons to shit on the heads of the people who torment her and, eventually, making a whole new social order in her head. This illustrates both the power of stories to change reality and their limits, including the way people without power can retreat into fantasy, but the whimsy starts to grate. Elif’s minimum wage job hoovering up the rain or her cultivation of her daughter in a plant pot seem more related by the play’s aesthetic than to its impact and meaning. The constantly refocusing narrative also makes it hard for the audience to feel fully committed to the story or its characters.  

The production, by Yasmin Hafesji, has been developed with the Rose Theatre, Kingston and Paines Plough, who toured it during the summer in their Roundabout mobile auditorium. She works well to create movement and dynamism to bring events to life that are occurring in the characters’ memories. Events are acted out with toy sheep and wooden castles on top of a travelling trunk, a simple but effective device. Ryan Dawson Laight’s design makes the most of limited resources, creating clever images with tethered balloons, splattered handfuls of soggy cloth and a trunk full of soil. The performers are fully committed to a demanding script, constantly switching roles perspectives. Sara Hazemi in particular is an engaging and convincing performer, and the focal point for everything that happens on stage.  

Elif’s climactic speech in which she imagines an impossible future in which she fences a field, declares independence and conquers the UK by marching on London from the south-west is fuelled by a level of desperation that hits home. However, her social vision is fundamentally compromised. She cannot see a way to run a country that does not include making war on neighbours and sacrificing the lives of her citizens. This leaves us in a dark place, with little to suggest a better way forward. Perhaps this is a realistic view of the way inhumanity infects by constraining possibility, a sobering and uncompromising message. A Sudden Burst of Violent Rain, while not a triumph, is certainly a provocative and imaginative piece of theatre. 

The show’s opening in Camden is particularly significant as it marks the first production at Teatro Technis by the famed Gate Theatre, which has moved from its tiny, atmospheric and wildly inaccessible home above the Prince Albert pub in Notting Hill. The Gate will now share the space on Crowndale Road with Teatro Technis. The venue is certainly a more practical place to make theatre, and every discerning audience member will want to wish the Gate, and its interim Artistic Director Steff O’Donnell, all the best to one of London’s most important fringe theatres in its new home.           

The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes by Back to Back Theatre – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Australian company Back to Back Theatre are touring the UK with their show about understanding, perception and togetherness. Seeing their work on these shores is an important and exciting experience, and it’s unlikely you’ll have seen anything like it before. This fact in itself is at the heart of the evening, because Back to Back’s performers have perceived to have learning disabilities (although the language used to group and define them is in an area of disagreement among the performers themselves). The three actors in The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price, have a range of different disabilities including brain injury and autism, unrelated conditions that nevertheless place them into the same box. People who do not fit our intellectual expectations are not often visible on our stages (although this year’s York Mysteries cycle provided a notable exception). A company that is driven by actors who fall into these categories is something entirely different to what we expect to see on stage. The results are a revelation, a piece of theatre that, like the best stage work, makes everything seem different afterwards.

Laherty, Mainwaring and Price convene a town meeting, set in Geelong, Victoria, with a row of plastic chairs and a speech-to-text display above. They wish to talk to us, the audience, about who we think they are and, more importantly, who we think we might be. The show reveals grim, fundamental truths about the way intellectually disabled people are abused, denied opportunity, enslaved and killed. It tells us things we really should already know, including the grim story of the way people living in the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland were forced to assemble board games for Hasbro. This is dark history, but in the hands of the performers (and their co-writers Michael Chan, Mark Deans, Bruce Gladwin and Sonia Teuben is become Beckettian theatre. Laherty and Price list games implicated in this scandal – Buckaroo, Mousetrap, Monopoly – in an increasingly surreal fashion. The patterns of speech are far removed from standard acting delivery, and draw us into a different rhythm of expectation where everything is slowed down, and people have different needs. They may, for example, need to send the rest of the cast off stage while they compose themselves, or not be able to deliver a speech in front of an audience, but it just becomes part of the way the show is delivered. No-one is in a rush, but there is plenty of discussion around what mutual respect involves.

The Siri-like subtitles are also a character in the show, sometimes misinterpreting speech and eventually getting involved in debate with the actors. Their presence is resented by the performers, who suggest with some accuracy that the real reason they might be hard to understand is not because they have disabilities, but because they are Australian. The relationship between technology and people gradually emerges as the real theme of the show. We are lulled into imagining we have been invited to see people we imagine to be ‘other’ explaining themselves but, as they point out, the technology they are obliged to use highlights their inadequacies. So how will we feel when AI develops to the point that makes everyone intellectually disabled? However hard we try, none of us will be able to catch up either, and we’ll be constantly exposed as not being good enough.

It is a stark and compelling thought. However, Back to Back have much more to offer than a lesson in schadenfreude. Their show is funny, unpredictable, clever and multi-layered. Director Bruce Gladwin has brought together something that only these performers could have produced, and it is enough to make us want not just theatre, but society, to be very different. We need to truly learn to see one another. At the end of the show the performers break into a series of very individual dances, which are a pure expression of self – real joy to be found among difficulty and doubt. The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes as a short run at the Battersea Arts Centre, then tours to Brighton, Cambridge and Leeds in early November. If you want to know about the future of theatre, you need to see this.

Evita Too by Sh!t Theatre – Soho Theatre, London

In development since earlier this year, when they presented a highly entertaining scratch version performed in part by interns, Evita Too is a Sh!t Theatre show – and that brings expectations, which are rather brilliantly fulfilled. In the years since their first success, Letters from Windsor House, Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole have forged a style that is entirely their own. They combine the personal, the political and the extremely silly in a way that is both very enjoyable and powerfully satirical. Their last show, Sh!t Theatre Drink Rum With Expats combined a boozy Med holiday with an exposé of the corruption in Maltese politics that became much better known shortly afterwards, when the assassins of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galicia were brought to justice. Evita Too is a more layered show, hitting a range of targets closer to home, which becomes apparent in the opening scene. After taking an audience vote on the options of a mind map of the show or the pair of roller skating naked to Starlight Express, the pair gives us what we want, obviously option two. This is very funny and also a neat way to introduce a wide-ranging debate about the nature of entertainment on stage, and the pressures of performing.

On the one hand, Sh!t Theatre have no love for “Tory peer” Andrew Lloyd-Webber and “UKIP donor” Tim Rice, but they know a good tune when they hear one. In fact, they’ve written a whole series for the show which they perform with a professionalism that reveals the talent underpinning their seemingly haphazard approach. They have also been on a research trip to Buenos Aires to inquire into Isabel Perón, Argentina – and the world’s – first female president. She is the apparent focus of the show, which exposes the misguided nature of the search for heroes and heroines. Perón, now forgotten rather than reviled, was the wife of Juan Perón who moved from popular left wing hero to right wing dictator, returning to from exile in 1974 and announcing his arrival with an airport massacre (audience members are drafted in as, among other things, massacred victims). When he died unexpectedly of a heart attack, Isabel took over for a turbulent two years during which she ran a death squad (only a modest one, as Sh!t Theatre are keen to clarify) before she was overthrown in a coup. She is still alive, in exile in Madrid, but Rebecca and Louise were sadly unable to meet her, although they film themselves trying and staging an exhibition nearby in an attempt to lure her out. There is a great deal of research behind the show, including jaw dropping details of the true Eva Perón story involving, amongst other things, a fascist wizard advisor, Eva’s lobotomy, and Juan and Isabel keeping Eva’s mummified corpse in their dining room. These are used to gleefully expose the artistic and political sham that is the Evita! musical.

The show is not just about Rice and Lloyd Webber and the monetised, post-Thatcher attitude to the arts that they represent, but uses this to reflect back on the experience of putting on a show in the current political climate. Evita Too is produced on a shoestring (not that any Sh!t Theatre show looks expensive) because they didn’t get the Arts Council funding they applied for. Their work is also becoming more personally precarious, and they intersperse an account of the fertility tests they take to find out whether either could still have children with their partners, while knowing that doing so could finish the other’s career. The scenes in which they drop the lights and talk to one another in silhouette about their fears are moving. Evita Too pretends to be chaotic, but it’s something of a triumph – a multi-layered performance that brings us laughter, tears and, for one lucky gentleman, the opportunity to make the performers mojitos live on stage while crushing ice in time as Louise and Rebecca perform a song and dance number, Evita!-style.

All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

All’s Well is the definition of a tricky play, with its combination of the fantastical and the emotionally brutal, its historically specific yet confusingly vague setting and its hard-nosed, difficult-to-love main characters. Embracing the oddness is probably the only way to make it work on stage but, despite some promising ideas and strong individual performances, Blanche McIntyre’s production does not feel coherent.

The programme focuses on the vulnerability of teens on the internet, which the production seems keen to use as a way to understand the young anti-lovers, Helena and Bertram. The staging uses back projections of social media posts and reels. As the play begins, this which works well with the online announcement of the of the Count of Roussillon’s off-stage demise. However, the idea never amounts to more than a series of interludes between scenes, and adds little to our understanding of the play.

Nor is the set by Robert Innes Hopkins a success. A large wooden domed frame is raised and lowered over the stage to distinguish between setting, but feels clumsy and functional, especially when hung with a cloth for back-projected phone footage which, for much of the time, remains blank.

The set also contributes to a lack of distinction between the play’s settings especially Roussillon and the French court, which is also reflected in the staging. Helena leaves her home, and the care of the Countess, to cure the French king of a fistula, offering her life as a sacrifice if she fails, a bid to secure Bertram as her husband in exchange. However, the court is full of louche, idling young men who play computer games, and any sense of threat is left to Bruce Alexander as the King. Fortunately, he gives the stand-out performance as a grizzled charmer whose demeanour turns when crossed into rumbling menace.

If the King wears his heart on his sleeve, and makes no secret of his authority, Helena becomes more guarded as she realises her lack of power. Rosie Sheehy is young and naive enough to imagine fairytales can come true (although dressing her a schoolgirl labours the point). She also possess fairytale powers of healing so when she cures the King, off-stage and without explanation, it is perhaps understandable that she expects he will make her happy ever after in return. Her mortification when she realises that Bertram has no wish to play the part she has assigned him is total. From then on, she works differently to achieve her aim. Faking her death, disguising herself as a backpacker (an updated version of the original pilgrim) and concocting a plot that deceives Bertram into getting her pregnant, she plays very dirty indeed. In a modern context she would be sent to prison for what she gets up to.

However, we are left in no doubt that Bertram is a wrong-un, and Benjamin Westerby very successfully conveys a disdain for Helena that goes beyond the horror of an excitable young man, careless of others, discovering his freedom has been taken away without his consent.

The success of the play requires some particularly disparate characters to convincingly create a world the audience can believe in. Some parts are notoriously challenging, especially the braggart Parolles who is less amusing than Shakespeare, in granting him a great deal of stage time, seemed to imagine. Jamie Wilkes works very hard indeed and entertains the audience with his physical daring and a spectacular psychic meltdown when tricked by his fellow soldiers, Falstaff-style, into revealing himself as an abject coward. However, his wider role in the play as a foil and warning to Helena remains is not clearly communicated.

Simon Coates, as the courtier Lafew, makes his scenes baiting Parolles very enjoyable. However, Funlola Olufunwa’s manic Widow seems unrelated to the play around her, while the character of the clown Lavache, despite Will Edgerton’s best efforts, seems peripheral. The Countess, usually seen as a star role, fades into the background. Claire Benedict seems to lack opportunities after the opening scenes to make her presence felt, and is not helped by the production which shunts to the back of the stage in most of her scenes.

Blanche McIntyre can do difficult Shakespeare well, as she demonstrated with her Measure for Measure at the Globe last winter. However, with All’s Well she does not locate the conceptual unity needed to bring the story together and help us believe in its sharp changes in tone and the moral opacity of its world. Rosie Sheehy’s performance is involving and legitimately low-key, but it seems at times to be undermined by the production which tries too hard to create noise – but not hard enough to help us understand the motivations of characters who refuse to behave the way we would expect.

Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis – Young Vic, London

The set of Who Killed My Father looks like a prison cell – tv, bed with bare mattress, concrete walls. The only indication that it’s something else is the oxygen cylinder hanging on the wall. This grim room represents the home of Hans Kesting’s father, where he lives and suffers in poverty and poor health after a lifetime of physically destructive labour. The play, based on Édouard Louis’ novel, looks back on the harsh childhood of the narrator and sole character, unnamed, in industrial northern France. Growing up gay in a working class town with a father who believed men should be men was harsh, but Ivo van Hove’s spellbinding production digs much further than that. By confronting the truth of his father’s behaviour towards him head-on, Kesting exposes the system that condemned him to work until he was broken, the violence generated by society as much as him, and the demonisation of men like his father for political purposes. It also reveals, despite it all, love.

Kesting, performing unusually in English, is remarkable in the role. Physically he dominates the space, a large man like his father, but he is capable of transformation. One minute he is the bloated and hunched figure of his father, the next he becomes his light-footed teenaged self again. His story is told through his body as much as his words. A stand-out moments include Kesting breaking into a wild dance in a desperate attempt to impress his father The key scenes are perhaps repeated cigarette breaks when he stands in the doorway at the rear of the set, wreathed in smoke, hacking. Van Hove and Jans Versveyweld, responsible for scenography and lighting, use subtle but haunting visual ideas, including the floor level tv that floods the room with eerie light and the holes punched in the plaster by the father whose boast is that, unlike his own father, he would never hit his family. The personal story becomes political towards the end, when Kesting’s rage erupts and he directs his condemnations at French politicians of the past decade who have cut benefits and, as he sees it, abandoned the working class. This is the gilet jaune story too but, while the movement was a magnet for crackpots, Louis cuts to the heart of why people who have missed out feel abandoned. The production is a minor masterpiece.

Sap by Rafaella Marcus – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Rafaella Marcus’ debut play is a tale set in modern London with ancient roots. Daphne (Jessica Clark) is bisexual, but finds herself in an increasingly complex situation with her new partner (Rebecca Banatvarla), who she had omitted to tell about her previous relationships with men. Meanwhile, she is seeing plants and trees growing inside houses, from the bus to work and in the office, which are apparently invisible to others. The myth of Daphne, the nymph who turned herself into a tree to escape Apollo’s attempted rape, begins to play itself out. The concept has potential, and the Roundabout’s bare, in-the-round stage is filled very effectively by director Jessica Lazar with nothing but the bodies of the two performers. The writing, however, falls short of its objectives. Clark works hard in her role but Daphne is a superficial and annoying character, speaking in a rush of cliches, but it is not clear this is the intended effect. The urban setting is also dominated by cliched tropes, such as lesbian poetry nights and anonymous Docklands apartment blocks, that don’t seem real. And the plot is stretched by the role of the creepy brother (also played by Banatvala, very well) whose motivations seem unlikely. It’s a promising debut that doesn’t quite succeed as intended.

The Rest of Our Lives by Jo Fong and George Orange – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Jo Fong is a dancer, director and choreographer. George Orange is a performance artist and clown. Both are middle-aged, and have decided that the rest of their lives start here. Their highly engaging double-act begins with getting very involved in seating the audience, and progresses into a series of apparently chaotic and rather brilliant dance and movement pieces. Exuding eccentricity, the pair do exactly as they please which consists of playing floor-filling tunes and dancing, or sitting down looking knackered, or ordering the audience about. The hour flies by in a series of low-tech, high-impact set pieces. The audience plays a messy game of ping pong with many, many bats and balls. Jo and George compete to get higher than the other, including clambering up the raked seats. George contorts himself through a school chair. Jo deadfalls towards the front row at various angles, always caught at the last minute by George. They sit nodding and looking smug to Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’. They draw the audience into a riotous karoaoke version of Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’. The show is both ludicrous and surprisingly moving, as their oblique approach explores the impact of getting older and wondering what’s next. It ends in a remarkable moment of mass dancing as the audience descends on the stage, suddenly finding themselves at full emotional stretch thanks to an unashamed expression of personality from these two delightful performers.