Shun-kin at the Barbican

Complicite’s latest show comes with its own apologia built in. The play draws on a short story by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, about the sado-masochistic 19^th-century relationship between a shamisen teacher, Shun-kin, and her servant and lover Sasuke. It also cites as an inspiration Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows. But that essay contributes little other than a tacked-on epilogue, which argues: we’ve become so used to electric light, we have no idea how dark the world once was.

That’s a concept to make the mind spin. But it’s got nothing to do with the story we’ve spent two hours watching. Its only relationship to the tale of Shun-kin and Sasuke, it seems to me, is to say: You probably struggled to identify with this story. Blame modernity. Don’t blame the director.

Certainly, we don’t care about Shun-kin or Sasuke. McBurney’s production is compelling enough – always beautiful to watch, staged with meticulous economy, always charged. But we never feel we know the obsequious servant, or the steely, blind Shun-kin (who is played for much of the show by a puppet). They are archetypes, not human beings. The production challenges us to see the sacrifice Sasuke makes – he relinquishes his independence, his whole life, to the pleasure of being Shun-kin’s whipping boy – as ‘transcendental’; as a paragon of selflessness. But (as McBurney must sense) few of us will buy that. Hence the catch-all homily about darkness and electric light. Things were different back then. How can we possibly understand?

I must say I quite enjoyed ‘Shun-kin’. I got on its wavelength and was drawn in. But I can still see that it doesn’t entirely work. It lacks poetic justice or characters with whom we can easily engage. It too uncritically buys into the mystique of Shun-kin’s beauty – and works an already tired caged-bird image to within an inch of its feathered life. It also makes one marvel that Complicite once won the Perrier Prize for comedy. What is becoming of their (his) knockabout sense of fun?

Another word on that epilogue. As the ‘In Praise of Shadows’ text is narrated in voiceover, McBurney contrasts the hurly-burly of the Tokyo metro, and of our hurried technological lives, with the simplicity of the shamisen – and, by implication, of Shun-kin and Sasuke’s story. A safety curtain descends, with clattering footage projected onto it of metropolitan busy-ness. As the curtain reaches floor-level, it crushes a solitary shamisen into splinters.

On the one hand, I thought: great. Whenever curtains descend upon stages, I long for something to get accidentally crushed or bonked on the head. But this was deliberate – and, insofar as it was meant as a resonant concluding image, specious. Because if anyone’s entitled to preach about the superiority of simplicity over technology, it ain’t Complicite, whose shows grow ever busier with video, projection, SFX, the works. A crushed shamisen may be a profound symbol of something or other. But it doesn’t sum up the story of Shun-kin, nor, coming from theatre’s very own Inspector Gadget, Simon McBurney, is it easy to take entirely seriously.