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Reader rating
Description: Shakespeare's comedy is adapted by director Yukio Ninagawa and presented in Japanese traditional theatre, Kabuki. Starring Onoe Kikugoro VII and Onoe Kikunosuke V. Performed in Japanese with English surtitles.
Trains: Tube/BR: Barbican/Moorgate 
Phone: 0845120 7550
Website: www.barbican.org.uk
Email: info@barbican.org.uk
Extra info: Pub, Food, Parking
Cross purposes: Nakamura Tokizo V as Olivia and Onoe Kikugoro VII as Malvolio
This is hard going. Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa enjoys a peerless international reputation but has always struck me as a creator of beautiful images without much substance. His Twelfth Night is a good hour longer than Michael Grandage’s superbly evocative recent West End production. And his decision to adapt a Shakespeare play for the Shochiku Grand Kabuki company seems a far less productive act of international cross-fertilisation than the truly innovative Shun-Kin, staged by Simon McBurney and Japan’s Setagawa theatre at the Barbican earlier this year. Ninagawa’s show eventually casts a spell but it’s slow and shallow.
To me Kabuki always feels a bit too close to panto. There’s the same exaggeration of costumes and performances, the standardised bits of business, the cross-dressing. And here the low comedy moments work best. Onoe Kikugoro VII, scion of a Kabuki acting dynasty stretching back four centuries, is a superb, overblown, pompous Malvolio, beset by cartoonish boobies. However, in keeping with the Kabuki trend of hayagawarii, or quick changes, he keeps popping off stage in to return as a rather dull Feste.
Similarly, the all-male company’s chief onnagata, or female impersonator, Onoe Kikunosuke V (Kikugoro’s son), plays both Viola, a woman disguised as a man, and her brother Cesario. In theory, this should add new layers of texture to the play. In practice, it means that the scenes where Viola and Cesario (and Malvolio and Feste) appear together have to be rewritten, or staged with a clumsy double.
To be fair, Kikunosuke and Ichikawa Kamerjiro II as Maria do create something fascinating: neither entirely male nor female but somewhere in between, far more impressive than Nakamura Tokizo V’s Olivia, a sing-song parody of a lady.
This being a Ninagawa production, it always looks staggeringly pretty. The kimonos are dazzling. The revolving stage turns to reveal sets of elegantly painted mirrored panels and fretwork screens, fields and ornamental bridges, and Ninagawa’s trademark image of dropping cherry blossom.
By the end I was acclimatised or lulled or simply sedated into a state of mild enjoyment. But the show meanders terribly, with no sense of pace or urgency, and simply wears you down with its relentless barrage of colour, ritualised speech, movement and facial expression.
Until 28 March (0845 121 6823, www.barbican.org.uk).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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