My impression of the Spirited Away theatre production

I was lucky enough to be taken along to the Spirited Away theatre production at the London Coliseum. I had never seen the original movie and decided not to watch it in order to appreciate the play on its own terms.

This production had countless puppets and each one had its own puppeteer(s). What stood out to me was how visible many of them were, dressed in plain brown and calmly occupying the stage next to the main characters during almost every scene. Sometimes it bordered on absurd, like when a tall man would fly around a little bird puppet in his hand like a toy plane while making chirping noises. Overall, there was not much attempt at suspension of disbelief; instead there was the joyful feeling of ~40 actors playing make-believe together.

When the frog puppet leapfrogged, the puppeteer moving him would leapfrog too. When the dragon puppet (a head on a stick with a long windsock behind it) flew in circles, the puppeteer below would be doing acrobatic spins and jumps. There is something comedic about a guy dragging a soot sprite on a string while squeaking cutely, which cannot be found from a squeaking soot sprite alone. The stage hands were clearly meant to be admired and enjoyed just as much as their puppets.

It fits perfectly with the environmental themes and animism present in the story. The stage hands were the small gods of the Spirited Away world, just like Haku was the small god of a river. Or rather, Haku was a stage hand within that world, who had forgotten what role he was meant to be playing.

Contrast that with No Face whose stagehand(s) moved inhumanly and were always obscured by a black veil, or with the car that Chihiro and her family arrived in, which didn’t have any props or stage hands at all but was merely an illusion created by the family’s confinement and jostling within invisible boundaries.

I found this lovely article about how in the first place, Spirited Away was inspired by various forms of traditional Japanese theatre and puppetry, and how they may have inspired the theatre adaptation in turn. I’m sure someone with more cultural context could draw lots more connections!