Spirited Away
‘Spirited Away’ is famously not the first of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterpieces to hit the London stage in the last two years. There is also, of course, the RSC’s ‘My Neighbour Totoro’, which has just announced a 2025 West End run after two sell out seasons at the Barbican. Comparisons between the two Studio Ghibli adaptations are inescapable. But if ‘Totoro’ was ambitious, you have to admire the sheer gall of anyone even thinking of tackling ‘Spirited Away’. Whereas ‘Totoro’ is a story of a limited number of supernatural creatures crossing over into a recognisable human world, ‘Spirited Away’ is about a young girl, Chihiro, who enters a fantastical realm entirely populated with wild spirit beings, from an emo dragon-boy to a colossal overgrown baby. It’s a huge ask technically and to cut to the chase, this impressive but slightly starchy Anglo-Japanese Tokyo production – directed by John Caird and co-adapted with Maoko Imai – doesn’t pull it off with the same panache and feeling of ground being broken as ‘Totoro’. Although Toby Olie’s puppets and Sachiko Nakahara’s costumes are vivid and impressive, they aren’t the absolute showstoppers that the RSC’s gargantuan, Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop-forged constructs are. And where all the spirits in ‘Totoro’ are puppets, ‘Spirited Away’ simply features too many characters to do that, and is reliant on human actors changing costumes a lot – sometimes it has the look and feel of an old fashioned song and dance spectacular.