Sputnik Sweetheart – Arcola Theatre, London

Haruki Murakami’s 1999 novel Sputnik Sweetheart comes to the Arcola stage, with all its ambiguity, loneliness and longing.

Sputnik Sweetheart

The novels of Haruki Murakami are not easy ones to stage.  Ambiguous, with frequently charismatic yet unreliable narrators, and other worlds as metaphorical plot devices.  I’ve read other works by the author, but not Sputnik Sweetheart.  So this new adaptation by Bryony Lavery was an opportunity to get to expand my Murakami universe as well as seeing how the creative team tool approached the challenge of staging it.

As if the task was not daunting enough, this adaptation of Sputnik Sweetheart sees the entire plot, with events stretching from Japan to Europe, fit into a short 80 minutes.  No mean feat.  Perhaps a little too short, as there’s a lot of plot, but more on this later.

As creative teams go, this production has a great one.  Lavery is an award-winning Adaptor.  Director Melly Still has directed for theatre and opera in the UK and internationally.  Shizuka Hariu is the Designer, and lectures as well as working on productions around the world.  Add the Lighting, Video, Sound Designers and Composer and Sound Associate to the team and it becomes quite formidable.

Exploring Worlds

I think for me one challenge with bringing Murakami’s story to the stage, for good or ill, is its ambiguity.  The story is that of Sumire (Millicent Wong), aspiring writer who has yet to find herself.  Enamoured with the older Miu (Natsumi Kuroda), her Sputnik Sweetheart, the pair travel together to Europe.  When Sumire disappears, Miu phones the novel’s narrator, a teacher known as K (Naruto Komatsu), to come to Greece and help look for her. The story then takes an unexpected turn into the metaphysical, before returning to Japan where K embarks on a subplot about helping his married girlfriend’s (Yuyu Rau) son (also played briefly by Wong), when he’s caught shoplifting.  

This is a lot of plot for a story of inner worlds, (sexual) desires and making sense of the world. Animation by Sonoko Obuchi represents some of the characters’ cross-dimensional, private thoughts (projected on multiple screens to get around the Arcola’s unusual layout), while a few key scenes are reworked for the adaptation to allow the thread of the story to hang together in this new medium. Visually, I thought it impressive.  The set is simple but versatile, with a dominant phone box taking us back to the analogue 1990s and doubling as a Ferris wheel amongst other things.  The movement is often stylised, which adds to some of the more potentially static scenes. It’s like a graphic novel playing out before us: whimsical yet at the same time suffused with a sadness or emptiness.

Struggling With Ambiguity

So all the constituent parts are there.  Yet I found I didn’t quite connect with the story and its characters.  Is this an effect of the original novel’s ambiguity, made manifest in theatrical form?  The quality of the acting is good (Kuroda has some devastating scenes as Miu), but I didn’t find myself emotionally invested in either Sumire or K. I suspect this may have something to do with the volume of plot to get through, without the satisfaction of a resolution. The quieter moments are short-lived, the characters’ motivations often unclear.

I do like a strong narrative element in my theatre, to be fair.  So perhaps I’m not quite the target market and this is more for those who are atmosphere and aesthetic-driven.  Or Murakami lovers.  There are definitely some excellent elements to Sputnik Sweetheart, and I do like a production that takes the risk of doing something different, rather than sticking with tried and true theatrical formulas. The best advice might be to go and check it out for yourself.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3/5

Sputnik Sweetheart on until 25 November 2023