Tramway, Glasgow
Five stars
When a man turns up at a cheap hotel in the outer edge of nowhere, the last thing he expects to find is a talking monkey, let alone one with whom he spends the night drinking while hanging on his every word. The man, a writer whose by-line we never discover, has just been in a meeting with an editor who couldn’t remember her own name.
The Monkey, a Bruckner loving beast with a hangdog demeanour and a yearning to connect, has come all the way from Shinagawa, from whence he might just be able to explain what’s going on. Not that this helps another woman called Mizuki much, let alone her long lost friend Yuko, whoever they might be.
This makes for a haunting adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short stories based around the Monkey. Knitted together by Glasgow’s Vanishing Point company in this international co-production with Japan’s Kanagawa Arts Theatre, where it premiered in November 2024, this makes for mesmerising viewing.
Conceived, devised and adapted by Vanishing Point director Matthew Lenton with the company’s long term collaborator and associate artist Sandy Grierson, the result stays true to Murakami’s elliptical minimalism, even as it opens things up in this bi-lingual production to make for a gorgeous fusion of style and substance. Kei Ishihara and Blankrd’s ice-cool scenography is key to this, as is Mark Melville’s seismic score and Simon Wilkinson’s other worldly lighting.
Everyday existential crises and trauma driven ennui are expressed through familiar Vanishing Point visual signatures, from the light and shade of the torch-lit search for the Monkey, to the way people peer through windows. Here, they bear witness from both sides of the glass, locked inside and out of the Murakamiverse conjured up by the nine-strong mix of Japanese and Scottish performers onstage.
There is something Faginesque about Grierson’s physical embodiment of the Monkey as he shuffles around, breaking cover in the hotel before scuttling back to his underground lair, his tail forever in motion as operated by puppeteer Ailie Cohen. The difference is that the Monkey picks pockets, not for financial gain, but for the comfort of human contact as a second-class citizen forced to live outside the system.
There is something even sadder about Mizuki, played mournfully by Rin Nasu. Beyond the therapy doled out by Elicia Daly’s Mrs Sakaki, Mizuki finds liberation and a passport out of her situation that allows her to walk away from the person she never wanted to be. As for the writer, played by Yuya Tanaka, he has a story to tell, and possibly sell in this slow burning meditation on identity, love, and what can happen when both disappear.
The Herald, February 25th 2025
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