Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey review – gorgeous whimsy from Haruki Murakami
It is a scene from Haruki Murakami's 2006 short story A Shinagawa Monkey, about a woman fearing for her sense of identity. Here, in this collaboration between Glasgow's Vanishing Point and Yokohama's Kanagawa Arts Theatre , it provides an extra layer of intrigue to an adaptation of the author's more recent Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey, which is a magical-realist encounter between a man and a talking animal in a down-at-heel ryokan, the only place the man can find a room for the night.
Adapted by director Matthew Lenton and actor Sandy Grierson, these short tales have a dream-like uncertainty, the line blurred between real and imagined. What is less likely: that a monkey might work in a hot-spring bathhouse or that he has a fetish for stealing women's names? Like the set that appears and evaporates – a triumph of stage management – the narrative offers little solid ground.
No question this can be beguiling, but on stage, it is also a limitation. What is whimsical and unknowable in just 30 pages of print feels like it is straining for meaning across a 90-minute production. Even on a metaphorical level, loss of identity is not one of the burning issues of the day. It is an intriguing idea for a brief, elliptical story, not a dramatic dilemma. It means a theatrically gorgeous show is thematically slight.
But gorgeous it is. Bathed in Simon Wilkinson's dusty orange lights, the stage occupies a space between night and day, wake and sleep, where the unsettling patterns of Mark Melville's sound design slowly give way to the soothing melodies of Bruckner. The actors fade in and out of focus, a shadowy chorus bearing witness to Grierson's astonishing performance as the Shinagawa Monkey, his politeness disrupted by guttural grunts, his human manners overwhelmed by simian impulse. Scratching, tumbling and longing for connection, he could be our darker animal selves.
At Tramway, Glasgow, until 1 March; then at Dundee Rep, 6-8 March
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