If you have ever wondered what being a drama student is all about, I urge you to take in The Elephant Vanishes, Simon McBurney's co-production with Complicite and Tokyo's Setagaya Theatre, currently at the Barbican. If, however, the idea of people being very theatrical about nothing in particular fills you with utter dread, then keep away. At the press night, I was riveted to my seat with absolute horror. It was almost exactly like one of the obligatory courses that were part of my drama degree, when we would get together and spend a week or so playing music on cheese graters, lying on our backs in semi-darkness whistling, choreographing movements and repeating them in a demented fashion, singing invented songs, and finally bring the whole cacophonic nonsense into what was proudly termed "a devised piece". It was then shown to a profoundly unimpressed audience.
The Elephant Vanishes is very much in the "devised" school. And it annoyed the hell out of me. McBurney is obviously smitten with Tokyo, its light, its noise, its amount of neon, and takes 90 minutes to tell us that the capital of Japan is, well, very noisy and bright. The performers achieve this through the hoary techniques of shouting at the audience, delivering "extraordinary" statistics about humming-bird wings and the speed of light, and so on, and, when the pace dropped, turning big spotlights on the auditorium so that we all sat wriggling uncomfortably in the glare. Very 1970s, and very surprising for McBurney and Complicite, whose production of Measure for Measure at the National this year was an innovative masterpiece full of panache. There's even a faux "The stage management regrets that . . ." announcement at the beginning of the show. Or maybe that's to allow people who performed on the Edinburgh Fringe during the early 1980s to feel at home.
According to the programme, the show is based on some short stories by Haruki Murakami - to which all I can say is: Chekhov, he ain't. Nor is he Maupassant. The dramatised tales consist of 17 days in the life of an insomniac, a married couple who love midnight feasts so much that they hold up a McDonald's and demand 30 Big Macs at gunpoint, and the title story of a chap concerned about a vanishing elephant. Do we care about these slices of life? We do not. Throughout, people wearing black stride around the stage shouting about "breaking the connection between mind and body". Occasionally they fly in the air like Peter Pan. Serious moments are indicated by references to western classics such as Wagner or Tolstoy.
I'm really happy to see non-western theatre in the West End (or anywhere, for that matter), and this production is part of a showcase of global talent at the Barbican. But I'm afraid that what McBurney and his Japanese counterparts have delivered is a cliche-driven mishmash of sub-Kill Bill orientalism, with Tokyo socialites depicted as institutionalised, sombre people who spend their lives forever swishing in and out of paper sliding doors. As I took my seat, an anxious reporter from the BBC World Service was canvassing people behind me. "You look Japanese," she said to a middle-aged man. "Can I talk to you afterwards about whether this show is like life in Japan?" At the end, I turned to him. "What are you going to say to her?" I asked. "I have no idea," he said. Perhaps for him, too, it was all lost in translation.
