Barbican theatre, London
With a dual narrative set in Tokyo and a world of dreams, Philippe Decouflé’s epic production is as bewitching as its balletic unicorns

How to stage Haruki Murakami’s epic, dual-narrative novel without leaving the audience in a muddle? Director-choreographer Philippe Decouflé goes big, filling the enormous Barbican stage with a kaleidoscope of dream worlds for Ako Takahashi’s adaptation. It could have become a scramble of stories and inquiries into memory, technological advances in society and the imagination. Instead, it is turned into one long immaculate coup de théâtre.

There are two versions of the protagonist, Watashi (Tatsuya Fujiwara) – one is in Tokyo, the other in a world comprising dreams. The city is noirish while the latter is beautiful but dangerous, with a complicated storyline involving the sundering of humans from their shadows, a walled city, roaming animals and a professor (Narushi Ikeda) who collects their skulls to channel past experiences through sound.