Productions - Complicite

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Original 2003 production. Photographer: Tsukasa Aoki

Original 2003 production. Photographer: Robbie Jack

2004 production. Photographer: Joan Marcus

Credits

Directed by Simon McBurney
Inspired by the collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami

Design Michael Levine
Sound Christopher Shutt
Lighting Paul Anderson
Projections Ruppert Bohle & Anne O?Connor
Costume Christina Cunningham

Performed by Mitsuru Fukikoshi, Atsuko Takaizumi, Yuko Miyamoto, Keitoku Takata, Ryoko Tateishi, Kentaro Mizuki, Yasuyo Mochizuki

Originally a Complicite co-production with Setagaya Public Theatre, Tokyo and BITE:03 Barbican, London

Generously supported by Agency of Cultural Affairs, Japan; The Japan Foundation; The British Council

With support from The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, The Daiwa Foundation, The Thornton Foundation

The Elephant Vanishes

Inspired by the collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami 'The Elephant Vanishes' (English version)

Murakami became a national celebrity when his novel Norwegian Wood sold over 4 million copies in Japan. His collection of short stories entitled The Elephant Vanishes reveal Japan as experienced from the inside, dislocating realities to uncover the surreal in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Strange, idiosyncratic and told with a bone-dry wit, these stories grip, disturb, provoke and catch you by surprise. Surprise because they are so recognisable but not predictable. What we recognise in these stories is a tension. A tension that exists as much in London as in Tokyo.

2004 Kinokuniya Theatre Award for Best Actress (Ryoko Tateishi)
2003 Evening Standard Theatre Award Nomination for Best Director (Simon McBurney)

Paul Taylor - The Independent, 3 July 2003

'There was a time when Simon McBurney and Complicite spurned technology in favour of communal storytelling that relied on the expressive powers of the body and the transforming capacity of inanimate objects...' read article

Sarah Hemming - Financial Times, 1 July 2003

"When I write, I write weird," the Japanese author Haruki Murakami has said of his work, and certainly nobody watching Complicité's exquisite staging of three of his stories would dispute the fact. All three are a wonderful blend of the mundane and the surreal: a Japanese version of magical realism in which alienated individuals find a fantastical response to the frantic repetitiveness of contemporary life. And Murakami has found in Simon McBurney a director ingenious enough to give these stories life on stage...' read article

Charles Spencer - The Daily Telegraph, 1 July 2003

'Ever since it began in the early 1980s, with a hilarious mime show about death, undertakers and funerals, Theatre de Complicite has excelled at theatrical tales of the unexpected...' More

Michael Billington - The Guardian, 30 June 2003

'Simon McBurney has shown a genius for animating European literary texts, and now, in a co-production between Complicite and Tokyo's Setagaya public theatre, he tackles the short stories of Haruki Murakami. The result is an astonishing piece of theatre in which communal storytelling effortlessly blends with hi-tech wizardry...' read article

Simon McBurney - The Guardian, 21 June 2003

'I stand on my balcony. It is night. I see into an office. All the monitors are blue. Fluorescents blaze on every floor. Below me is a car park. For some reason it appears green. Sodium light? A man moves across in the half-darkness and peers into a car. The car pulls away with a screech of tyres...' read article


		Opened in May 2003 at the Setagaya Public Theatre, Tokyo. Toured to Theatre Drama City, Osaka and Barbican, London as part of BITE:03. Returned in 2004 touring to Setagaya Public Theatre, Tokyo; State Theater, New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival; Barbican, London as part of BITE:04, MC93 Bobigny Paris as part of the Festival d'Automne and The Power Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.