End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland review – Murakami’s marvel brilliantly brought to life

Barbican theatre, London With a dual narrative set in Tokyo and a world of dreams, Philippe Decouflé’s epic production is as bewitching as its balletic unicorns How to stage Haruki Murakami’s epic, dual-narrative novel without leaving the audience in a muddle?

Director-choreographer Philippe Decouflé goes big, filling the enormous Barbican stage with a kaleidoscope of dream worlds for Ako Takahashi’s adaptation. It could have become a scramble of stories and inquiries into memory, technological advances in society and the imagination. Instead, it is turned into one long immaculate coup de théâtre. There are two versions of the protagonist, Watashi (Tatsuya Fujiwara) – one is in Tokyo, the other in a world…