The title of Hideki Noda's latest play is ‘minus three twenty Fahrenheit’, roughly the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, the temperature at which a body sits suspended in cryogenic storage. It's also, roughly, the temperature at which this review nearly froze trying to explain the plot to a friend afterwards.
The Japanese theatrmaker’s company NODA MAP returns to Sadler's Wells for a third round, following A Night at the Kabuki (2022) and Love in Action (2024), with its latest being billed as ‘a Faustian descent through myth, memory and other bad ideas’. Unsurprisingly, then, given that Noda is notorious for jam-packing his plays, this one runs across three timelines, all featuring characters chasing angel bones.
In the modern strand, sniping pharma siblings President Oolong Deathmask (Satoshi Hashimoto) and Chairman Oolong Cha (Shoko Takada) – the production's best running joke – hunt the mythical bone using the vibrating one in the body of Help’s (Sadawo Abe) as their compass. With the help of their research team, they want it ground into supplements for an engineered Ultimate Human, or harvested to cure a genetic condition called AngelDN – either way there’s money in it.
In the medieval strand, Mephisto (Suzu Hirose), the half-angel half-devil heroine, stakes a wager against God which sets up a fateful pact with Dr. Faust (Isao Hashizume).
In antiquity, an empire answers to Queen Himiko, based on the legenadry shaman-ruler of early Japan.
For all its denser themes, Faustian and otherwise, the mice, the deafness, the hubris of playing God with AI and genetic engineering, comedy cuts through: gossiping cleaners, a dream sequence raining bananas, a ‘Japan's Next Top Human’ pageant told through dance. These moments are so much fun that more silliness, and less exposition, would have been welcome relief… along with trimming something like 90 extraneous minutes.
Shigehiro Ide's choreography is a highlight, simple and spare movement that turns feral, cast members lurching and twitching with a physicality that communicates mutation and dehumanisation better than the script often manages. That same instinct carries the transitions between eras, swift and near magical, bevelled glass panels duplicating characters and colourful video projections of high-rises washing across a backdrop of contemporary black-and-white brushstrokes.
One thing lost in translation, literally, is the surtitles, set on a black strip high above the stage, forcing anyone who doesn't speak Japanese to choose: read or watch. You can't do both, and eventually the juggling act becomes a workout, which for a show whose case rests on spectacle is a real cost.
Beyond the surtitles, a lot of this may still go over British heads. The Pied Piper's hunt for Meshisto mirrors the 2016 Sagamihara care home attack, where a former employee murdered 19 disabled residents believing he was relieving them, and society, of a burden, a parallel that's easy to miss without a program note or a bit of digging. But with so much already competing for attention, that's the least of the play's problems, and NODA MAP shouldn't have to soften these references for a Western audience anyway.
−320°F is a little too full of its own ideas, so much so that even fearless maximalism can't distract from its own convolution. Noda has spent 50 years asking audiences to keep up with him. Is it worth the sprint? Just about.