Death haunts these two plays by Yukio Mishima, which the Ninagawa company has brought to the Barbican BITE season - hardly surprising when you remember Mishima's legendary samurai-style suicide in 1970. However, it is Ninagawa's seductively elegiac style as much as Mishima's austerely dramatic substance that makes this an impressive evening.
Within seconds of the play's opening I realised I had seen Sotoba Komachi before, at the Edinburgh festival in 1990. The image of an old bag-lady haunting a twilit park full of passionate lovers and cascading camellias brought memories flooding back.
In this updated Noh story the 99-year-old heroine tells a young poet that death awaits those who dub her beautiful; inevitably we see the cycle of destruction repeated. In Ninagawa's hands Mishima's selfconscious literary re-creation becomes something magical.
As the wizened heroine who is told she was once lovely, Haruhiko Jo testily snaps: "Was? I still am." And, as we flash back to her youth, the Fauré Requiem gives way to Strauss waltzes and the sight of Imperial Army officers dancing with porcelain beauties. The play becomes a meditation on mortality, decay and evanescence. It adds to the sense of eerie illusion when we realise that the women in the park are played by men.
Mishima's preoccupation with death and spiritual decline emerges even more strongly in Yoroboshi. He deals with two sets of parents, natural and adoptive, staging a courtroom battle for possession of their son. The catch is that the son is a war-blinded 20-year-old who dismisses the competing parents as slaves and fools, and who, in his sightlessness, has a vision of a degenerate world coming to its necessary end.
Written in 1960, the play clearly anticipates Mishima's own hara-kiri protest at Japan's spiritual decadence; and Ninagawa's production skilfully highlights the parallels. Tatsuya Fujiwara, as the hero, is both a mixed-up maniac and a homoerotic figure who arouses everyone's protective love. And, as a blood-red sunset lights up the courtroom windows, Wagnerian chords invade our senses. In a final dramatic coup we even hear Mishima's own death speech from Japanese army headquarters.
In Ninagawa's hands, the play becomes an elegy by and for Mishima; and even if in the west we have to take Mishima's disruptive cultural impact on trust, the production, in its move from courtroom symmetry to grandly explosive climax, eloquently gives one a measure of his mythic status. In Ninagawa, Mishima has clearly found the perfect interpreter.
Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7638 8891. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
