It is in love with all the many tools of theatre – high and low tech – but doesn't know how to use them in service of the narrative and meaning rather than itself. Any emotional impact is smothered by a show that is constantly showing off its technical prowess. There are plenty of moments when it is strangely surreal and achingly beautiful: a woman's dress as sheer as a piece of human skin drifts across the stage a film leads us into the dark hotels of memory.īut while it is always visually extraordinary, it is totally uninvolving. In a scenario that has the qualities of a hallucinatory thriller, Okada's search for the truth brings him up against a teenager obsessed by death, a survivor of Japan's military exploits in Manchuria, a prostitute of the mind, and his wife's brother, a sinister rightwing politician who believes that the nation has been emasculated.Īdaptor and director Stephen Earnhart has taken seven years to bring Murakami's mysterious acclaimed epic to the stage and he has certainly thrown everything at it: live and recorded music, film, projections, Butoh, puppetry, dance, Robert Wilson-style lighting, Robert Lepage's style transformations, Complicite-style layering and a David Lynchian sensibility. In pursuit of his missing wife, Okada must go into the well in order to understand himself and take responsibility for his own past and that of his country. Lewis Carroll had his rabbit hole, and Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has his dried-up well, a dark place that is very much a well of loneliness but one with transforming possibilities. Is Toru Okada just experiencing one more loss – the loss of his mind – or is he finally waking up to the world around him as he turns psychic detective on his own apparently mundane life? But late one night he receives a strange phone call and a visitor that turn his life inside out.

A man alone and isolated in the big city. His whole life has become a kind of absence, and he is the void at its centre. T oru Okada has lost his job, his cat and his wife.

The wind up bird chronicle pages