We are often told, “you will never have seen anything like this before”, but it turns out to be true in the case of this frenetic 45 minutes hailing from Japan that arrives in London as part of LIFT festival. It’s like mainlining a mashup of High School Musical, an extreme Japanese TV reality show, a cheesy pop video and an out-take from Les Misérables in the company of a group of hyperactive under-fives who are having a food fight with the volume pumped up to maximum.
There’s a very good reason why you are offered plastic macs and earplugs: buckets of water are sloshed around, glitter confetti is sprayed across the audience, and we are liberally doused in tofu and seaweed. It might look like utter chaos, but it’s not. The large cast of ever-smiling, good-looking young people are tightly drilled in a production by Toco Nikaido that knows exactly what it’s doing as it simultaneously celebrates the aspirations of Japanese pop-idol culture and mercilessly sends up its vacant heart.
With a magpie tendency to alight upon the shiny shards of western culture that have taken over the Japanese brain like knotweed, this short, sharp theatrical shock cleverly tries to make us conform, even as it smilingly reminds that an audience being sold manufactured idols and dreams is an audience who will never rebel. Exhausting, but pretty unforgettable, not least for the faint smell of seaweed that followed me for hours after.
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The Pit, London, until 2 July. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
