The flat, enigmatic prose of bestselling author Haruki Murakami left me cold when I read his novel Norwegian Wood: but I might give him another go thanks to this stylish adaptation of 1999’s Sputnik Sweetheart, by writer Bryony Lavery and director Melly Still. A story of loneliness, desire and longing, from the near past when smartphones and social networks weren’t ubiquitous, it’s a strange but beguiling event, and surprisingly warm.
In the novel the schoolteacher narrator, known as K, explains his unrequited love for his female friend Sumire who is (yawn!) an aspiring novelist, obsessed with Jack Kerouac. Here, attractively played by Naruto Komatsu, he is just another character whose veracity is doubtful, rather than the dominant male filter.
At a party, Sumire (Millicent Wong, making an irritating character charming) feels a sudden, powerful and apparently reciprocated attraction for elegant older Korean wine importer Miu (a poised Natsumi Kuroda). Miu mistakes the word “beatnik” for “Sputnik”, but immediately offers Sumire a job. The play is ripe with associations: Kerouac wrote Lonesome Traveler: Sputnik means “travelling companion”.
Sumire has never felt love before, while Miu’s desires turn out to have been cauterised by a mysterious sexual trauma in Switzerland when she was 25. On their trip together to Greece, Sumire goes missing. K rushes out, even though he is having a relationship with the mother of one of his pupils (Yuyu Rau, who mutely shadows the action before stepping into character). K can’t separate love and lust and can’t really relate to his lover’s wayward son.
The characters smoke, philosophise (“what is beauty, what value does it have?”), bond over their favourite Beethoven sonatas and bluntly express their feelings to each other. But they are incapable of real connection, which involves sacrifice. Still’s production has a potent sense of figures tenuously anchored to human society, and likely at any moment to slip, like the Sputnik satellite, into the ether, or onto another plane of existence.
It’s presented on a stage that’s pretty much bare apart from a phone booth with a long receiver cord in which the characters repeatedly get tangled. Naïve animations are projected onto the auditorium walls: I particularly enjoyed the ones of the chilled cucumbers K thinks of when trying to tame his libido. Still is a choreographer as well as a director, so at times the characters deliquesce into writhing, overlapping shapes.
Sometimes mood can be as strong a tool as narrative, and sometimes the pretentious can be a hair’s breadth from the profound. This Murakami adaptation is scrappy at times, coolly sexy and quietly compelling at others, and hugely involving overall. I’ll definitely give the books another go.
Arcola Theatre, to November 25; buy tickets here
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