Theatre

In this east-meets-west collaboration between writer Colin Teevan and actor-director Hideki Noda, Freud-meets-Noh theatre, as spirits from classical Japanese myths are yanked literally out from under the psychiatrist's couch. It begins like a standard shrink v psycho thriller: a crime has been committed by a woman who cannot remember who she is and the psychiatrist must prove her criminal responsibility. But that's just a a jumping off point for this ritually choreographed piece, which dives into a submarine world of fantasy and loss from which it never quite surfaces . Kathryn Hunter plays the accused, Yumi: a woman who acts out the roles of mistress to eleventh-century Japanese Casanova, Prince Genji rather than her own unbearable self. Hunter needs all her protean and uncanny qualities for this role, pulling red silk ribbons out of her body to express the abortions her real-life lover drove her to. Her fantasies engulf the stage in long bright silks: fans are another traditional prop which are ingeniously modernised, becoming champagne flutes, mobiles, and (marvellously) pizza slices devoured by the police team. The thematic overload (there's at least one myth too many), plus the fact that the crime-plot and the fantasy-world don't have enough points of contact, don't make this any less beguiling