Did No-Face ace it? The critics weigh in on Spirited Away

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage

★★★★

“At first, it’s a bit hard for non-Japanese speakers to get their eyes round the surtitles while simultaneously marvelling at the wonders unfolding on stage. Yet quickly the story and the production assert their hold. This show is so transfixingly beautiful and so completely assured that it feels like balm; it’s almost hypnotically assured.

“The story of Spirited Away is complicated and simple at the same time. On her way to a new home with her parents, young Chihiro is sucked into a parallel spirit world from which she cannot escape. She finds herself working at a bathhouse for the Shinto gods, controlled by the powerful witch Yubaba – and encounters many strange characters as she works out how to get back to the human universe.”

Louis Chilton, The Independent

★★★★★

“Spirited Away is three hours of constant, unpredictable spectacle. There are so many scenes here, so many locations and characters, all imbued with a tremendous visual flair and kineticism. The stage itself is chameleonic – mostly working around a two-tiered, hut-like edifice that swivels to imagine the bathhouse’s various rooms.

“The paranormal characters, too, are a delight. There’s nefarious witch and bathhouse owner Yubaba (Mari Natsuki), whose face segments and balloons to the size of a double bed when she’s angry. There’s the quirky, six-armed boiler room operator Kamaji (Tomorowo Taguchi), who lords over a workshop of tiny, soot-like puppets. There’s Haku (Kotaro Daigo), a benevolent spirit forced to work as Yubaba’s enforcer, who transforms into a flying blue and white dragon. (The giant puppet is one of the show’s most reliable visual flourishes.) And there’s No-Face (Hikaru Yamano), a creepy imp-like ghoul who starts feeding on the bathhouse employees until a whole mass of black-clad actors is needed just to fill out his ungainly outline.”

Sarah Hemming, Financial Times

★★★★

“On screen, the elastic capacities of animation conjure this ever-changing world. Stage brings a different asset: the imagination of the audience. So, as the action tumbles around Jon Bausor’s evocative, revolving wooden set, an army of skilled puppeteers and actors breathe life into Toby Olié’s 50 puppets, giving us froggy bathhouse workers, a vast, putrefying god and ornamental vases with attitude. Most enjoyable are Yuya Igarashi as Yubaba’s three-headed henchman, Tomorowo Taguchi as the multi-armed boiler stoker and Hikaru Yamano as the lonely spirit No Face, who slides around the stage with eerie grace.”

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian

★★★★

“Sachiko Nakahara’s costumes stand out too, much more elaborate than Totoro’s, and the puppetry designed by Toby Olié is a combination of the cute, magical and comic. There is no puppet that matches the physical scale and surprise of Basil Twist’s in Totoro but they are no less imaginative – maybe more so. Sorceress Yubaba (Mari Natsuki) turns into a gigantic face held by several puppeteers, coal-man Kamaji (Tomorowo Taguchi) is a characterful arachnoid-human hybrid and No-Face (Hikaru Yamano) becomes the scariest creation of the show as a hideously engorged monster of the bath-house. The sooty coal carriers of the boiler room have an uncanny resemblance to the soot sprites in Totoro and are sweet, but not quite as lively.”

Sam Marlowe, The Stage

★★★

“Already a success in Japan, John Caird’s staging is meticulously faithful, almost shot by shot, to its source material, and often looks lovely. But it’s missing the emotional guts and sinewy connective tissue required to make it properly 3D, its swirling imagery and meandering narrative remaining stubbornly flat. There’s always something rich and strange to look at, always something fantastical happening; but we often don’t know exactly what, or why – and too often, crucially, we don’t much care.”

Nick Curtis, Evening Standard

★★★

“Caird’s adaptation, created with his wife Maoko Imai, began life four years ago and its Tokyo run sold out in four minutes. It’s performed here in Japanese with English subtitles, and though this is testament to London’s cosmopolitanism, I do wonder who its audience is meant to be. It’s too sappy and fairytale-ish to be entirely for adults, too discomfiting and grotesque for some children. It’s less accessible than the RSC’s similarly inventive 2023 adaptation of Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro, which transfers to the Gillian Lynne Theatre later this year.”