Spirited Away, the stage spectacular: 'Every 20 minutes there's something that would be the finale of another play'.
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The theatrical adaptation of Studio Ghibli's beloved animated film sold out in Japan in four minutes. Regarding the UK, we meet the international team of creatives who bring its giant dragons and tiny soot sprites to life.
The dragon comes to life when Toby Olié picks it up by its tail. He spins it through the air and, with the speed of ripping off a band-aid, tears the creature in two.
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"Even when it was curled up on the floor," says the puppeteer, undoing another dragon's joints, "it took up too much space. Olié glues the body back together, a little shorter but more malleable now, and the tail wriggles back into life.
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Best known for his work on War Horse, Olié holds a miniature prototype for Haku, a boy who transforms into a giant serpentine dragon. Haku is one of the main characters in Hayao Miyazaki's exquisite animated film Spirited Away, which has been adapted into a primary stage production.
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For the past four years, the creative team has been conjuring, tweaking, and perfecting Miyazaki's world of gods and monsters in three dimensions.
The life-size dragon, for which Olié drew inspiration from fan art as well as close studies of the film, is now more than four metres long, with 4,000 hairs individually attached to its spine, ears that flick back when it's frightened, and a body strong enough to carry a child on its back as it flies.
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Last year's Tokyo run of Spirited Away sold out in just four minutes. Now, the Japanese-language production is bringing its wizards and shape-shifters to London.
(Coincidentally, the show arrives at a similar time to the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of My Neighbour Totoro, Miyazaki's 1988 animated film, which returns to London next year at the Gillian Lynne Theatre.)
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Performed in Japanese with English translation, the cast and their cohort of puppets are accompanied by a live orchestra playing Brad Haak's adaptation of Joe Hisaishi's original score. Working on an extravagant scale, the production is one of grand spectacle, minute detail and enormous heart. "Every 20 minutes, there is something that in any other play," says Olié proudly, "would be the finale.
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Olié was brought on board by director John Caird, who has long been a fan of Miyazaki's wild and beautiful animation. "My wife introduced our children and me to the films, and I was enthralled," says Caird. "I think Spirited Away is a work of genius."
Caird, who co-directed Les Misérables with Trevor Nunn, has spent many years producing large-scale opera and theatre in Japan, where his wife and Spirited Away co-adapter Maoko Imai also works as an assistant director. "I couldn't have done it without her," he says. "She completes my sentences.
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Caird was raised to believe in the great importance of children's stories. He insists that Miyazaki's masterpiece should be seen on a par with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan. "Like them," he explains, "it's an imaginary world that completely encapsulates its own rules of imagination. It's such a great children's story that it's just as enjoyable for adults.
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Describe Spirited Away to someone who hasn't seen it, and you'll quickly fall down a rabbit hole of munching stink monsters and radish ghosts, environmental destruction and people turning into pigs, not forgetting the playful susuwatari or soot ghosts, the helpful little creatures who carry coal on their backs.
But at its heart, Spirited Away is a story of change. It follows a girl, Chihiro, whose parents move her to a new home and who finds herself caught up in the events of a Japanese bathhouse frequented by the gods.
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I sold the idea to Miyazaki by describing how I imagined a vast bathhouse on stage.
John Caird
This is a clash of two great Japanese traditions. "Miyazaki told me that watching documentaries about Japan's Shinto gods made him want to invent his version of their off-duty lives," smiles Caird.
The importance of bathing in Japanese culture was recently highlighted when the touring production ran into a problem when the cast realised that the flats they were staying in here in the UK had no baths, only showers.
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Unlike most Studio Ghibli films, the setting of Spirited Away is mainly domestic, no matter how fantastic the guests and goings-on are. "The way I sold the idea to Miyazaki was to describe how I imagined a giant bathhouse on stage," says Caird, who had to get the director and his team's approval to stage the show.
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Jon Bausor, the designer behind The Grinning Man and the opening of the 2012 Paralympic Games, came up with the idea of the bathhouse as a Noh stage, inspired by the architecture of the centuries-old classical Japanese performance style.
Fully realised, a central wooden structure sits atop an ever-shifting revolve so that the stage never looks the same from one scene to the next. Such colossal feats of imagination were a prerequisite for staging such a vast story. "Immediately after he said yes," Caird says of Miyazaki, "he added rather mischievously, 'But how ... how on earth are you going to do it?
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"As simply as possible," Olié replies. He pulls out a sketchbook and turns to a page where limbs and faces appear in elegant watercolours.
Some of the ghosts were realised precisely as he first drew them, while others took longer to find the right shape; the giant version of Kaonashi, or No-Face, the lonely ghoul befriended by Chihiro, started as an inflatable body that became too unruly on stage.
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He flips forward a few pages, where several shadowy bodies wriggle underneath the large, moon-faced face. "Often the solutions we found were more elegant," says Olié, explaining how the idea of Kaonashi as a devouring flash mob gradually solidified, with each dancer swallowed by the creature becoming a new part of its body.
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I feel fortunate and privileged. Shows of this scale and length are never done. Everything in the show is done by hand.
Mari Natsuki
Released in Japan in 2001 and the UK in 2003, Spirited Away has recently become the highest-grossing Japanese film ever. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and is widely regarded as one of the best-animated films ever made.
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But when Mari Natsuki was hired to voice the film, she had no idea of its remarkable legacy. "I was sitting across from Miyazaki, and he looked at my face," Natsuki says, gazing intently forward, "and drew Yubaba.
That's how my relationship with Studio Ghibli began. Natsuki's character, Yubaba, owns the bathhouse, and her hard work for Chihiro forms much of the story's central drama.
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The actress initially saw Yubaba as cruel, but conversing with Miyazaki changed her interpretation. "He told me that Yubaba is like Toshio Suzuki," says the dedicated Studio Ghibli producer.
"They're just really hardworking." The lack of a pure villain is a defining characteristic of Ghibli animation. "No one is irredeemable," says Caird.
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Two decades after voicing Yubaba and her twin sister Zeniba, Natsuki returned to play the same roles on stage. To physically become Yubaba, she uses a Japanese hair cap and a habutai to hold her hair under her wig, then layers on bright blue eye shadow, a fake nose, and wrinkles.
"Same as Kabuki theatre," Natsuki explains, referring to the highly stylised Japanese art form. "It doesn't have to be beautiful. It has to be impressive."
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With almost 2,400 seats, the Coliseum is London's most prominent theatre; in Japan, they have performed to even larger audiences. "It takes overwhelming energy," says Natsuki, before grinning broadly.
"But it is a joy." Each lead role has multiple performers, a tradition Caird started in Japan with Les Misérables after a dispute between two actors who wanted to play the same role.
The practice is now standard, encouraging more fans to see the various A-list casts and giving the actors more flexibility in their busy schedules.
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Even if something is only on stage briefly, let the audience know what it's thinking, feeling, and wanting.
Toby Olié
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Caird describes the initial rehearsal process for Spirited Away as "a nightmare." It coincided with a Covide spike, which meant that the British and American sides of the production team were stuck across the border. Olié directed the puppets through a screen, and the cast, crew, and translators muddled until they could finally be together in person.
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A handful of British theatre-makers may run the show, but the team knows how significant Japanese storytellers' presence is to its authenticity. "We import so many shows into Japan," sighs Caird. "Very little comes the other way, which is a shame."
He says This is an opportunity to showcase the brilliant Japanese cast and crew. Natsuki adds how proud she is to be doing a Japanese show in London. "I feel fortunate and privileged. It never happens on this scale and for this length."
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As in the bathhouse, Natsuki enjoys that "everything in the show is done by hand". The show's ensemble handles all the scenery and puppetry, who wear khaki to match the wooden set; inspired by the Japanese tradition of kabuki stagehands, they have earned the sweet nickname "khaki-bukis".
Caird always knew he didn't want to hide any stage mechanics. "It's not magic to see the strings for something flying," he says. "You always have to open your hands to the audience and say: 'You can see how we're doing it, but you can still believe in it.
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Olié points to a carved wooden figure, a bunraku-inspired puppet, perched on a shelf in his studio. This demand for total belief in every moving part of Spirited Away stems from his love of Bunraku, the 17th-century art form in which three people manipulate a single puppet body with full-body concentration.
"You train on the puppet's feet for 20 years," Olié explains, "and then, when you're good enough, you move on to the head.
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The precision and clarity appeal to him, even though his team has worked a little faster on Spirited Away than the bunraku timeline would allow; with associate puppetry director Sarah Wright and puppet co-designer Daisy Beattie, the team has created more than 60 impossible creatures for the show.
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They have worked hard to embed detail and rigour into each one's story and design. "Even if something's only on stage for a short time, make sure it has an impact," Olié insists. "Let the audience know what they're thinking, feeling, wanting."
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As if in response, there is a rustle behind him and a prototype of a soot sprite, its body wiry and its eyes big, tumbles out of a corner, seemingly of its own accord. Olié shrugs and laughs. Stay in Miyazaki's world long enough; some elements of his magic will spill around the edges.
Spirited Away runs at the London Coliseum until 24 August 2024.
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