Shun-kin

  At the heart of Shun-kin, the latest production from Simon McBurney’s Complicite, in a co-production with barbicanbite 09 and the Setagaya Public Theatre, Tokyo, is a simple love story: that of a blind, wealthy merchant’s daughter and her slightly older apprentice lover, who blinds himself for love after she has treated him cruelly and been assaulted by another suitor.

The story comes from the popular Japanese writer Jun’chiro Tanizaki who appeals to our modern fetishes of sexuality and the body, the pleasures and perversions of our real and imagined lives, according to the scholar Stephen Dodd. What appeals, obviously, to McBurney, is the chance to place a chillingly observed relationship in a context of modern fascination.

He follows the original in having the tale recounted by a narrator living in Osaka in the 1930s, the real time of the story itself. This woman pores religiously over the text, hunched in a small pool of light, reading the story while the actors mime it in slow motion. For most of the evening of nearly two uninterrupted hours, the blind, sexually sadistic Shunkin is played by a puppet manipulated by two female attendants.

She later emerges, half-naked and alluring, in the shape of an actress whose name I cannot divulge (the programme lists the company without attributing roles), and her puppeteers are still on hand. This transition is one of several beautiful effects; another being the loyal Sasuke’s piercing of his own eyes with pins; another, admittedly hackneyed, the sprouting of red ribbons when Shunkin is facially wounded.

But unlike in his previous collaboration with this company, The Elephant Vanishes, based on the stories of Haruki Murakama, Shun-kin finds McBurney resisting cultural cross-pollination, concentrating instead on the slow, boring purity of a deliberate presentation owing something to both Noh and Kabuki traditions. The framing device is just that, until the very last moments when the stage is transformed in light.

Shunkin is a master of the shamisen, the Japanese lute-like musical instrument with three strings that is played constantly at the side of the stage while Sasuke graduates from shop boy to lover, apprentice to master himself and keeper of the sacred flame. But an air of suffocating piety hangs over the show, and you long for emotional break-out.

- Michael Coveney