The Garden of Words

I just happened to see this advertised at the Park Theatre, Finsbury Park and I thought it looked interesting, so following my usual thought processes I bought tickets without any further research.

The play opens with rain and a bustling street and umbrellas and then a packed train journey before  schoolboy Takao (Hiroki Berrecloth) ends up sheltering from the rain.  There’s an older woman, Yukari (Aki Nakagawa),  already in the shelter and there's a bird watching and swooping around them.  The rest of the first half of the play consists of a series of episodes playing out the back stories to these characters. It looked good and it was atmospheric but I had trouble pulling it together to make anything cohesive.  Then when you add that although the dialogue was in English but with chunks of Japanese at key points, it was fair to say I was engaged but confused.  Why all the shoes I kept wondering… why a shoemaker?  After a restorative ice cream we came back for a short second half which brought all the threads together into a satisfying emotional conclusion.  Turned out it had been a coming of age play  about alienation all along, with all the characters unable to connect properly with each other.  Although I still wasn’t all that clear what the bird was about. 

On the way home I started watching  the anime that the play was based on.  And what a beautiful film it is, with the rain almost a character itself, (I watched it again just to look at the gorgeous rainy scenes), and with a focus just on the relationship between the two leads.  And then, the play made a lot more sense as it wove in the context and back story to these characters that are just hinted at in the original work.  

Overall the play is a bit of a mixed bag, actors doing a great job but I did struggle with the dropping in and out of the different elements of the story.  But the ending was good, and I liked the resolution of the relationship a bit better in the play than the film.    This is an example though of my policy of not doing too much research before a play not paying off.  The play is a great enhancement and companion piece to the film, but without that context I think it lost a little bit, and I do wish I had seen the film first.  Now, I am thinking back with quite a lot of 'ah so *that's* what that was about'.  So, an interesting night out which had the bonus of taking me to the anime on Netflix and the beautiful rainy scenes.  I’ll take that as a good result. 

EDIT:  The actor playing Takao looks so much like Joe Locke I kept doing a double take