Love in Action ★★★★★ Sadler's Wells Theatre | Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2024


Hideki Noda's Love in Action is a wonderfully wild ride into Japanese history centred on the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. The piece which is based on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov centres around the trial of Tomitaro, one of the Karamatsu brothers. He is accused of murdering his father as a result of a love triangle in which he shared a mistress with his parent. The story loosely follows the Russian author's original with Tomitaro's two brothers representing two contrasting perspectives on reality, the scientific and the spiritual, but in this version there is also a deeply political allegory. This is all broadly played for laughs, and the show abounds with wacky references to Western cultural touchstones from Leonardo's The Last Supper to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. There are also some brilliantly loony allusions to current pop culture. Who saw a quotation from Dirty Dancing coming? It is all a delightfully manic mishmash, and just when one thinks one might have grasped a linear thread, things will swing wildly out of rational control with a send-up of something like science fiction and time travel. Our best advice would be to just sit back and enjoy the ride as the extraordinary comic energy gradually focuses, and the question of Tomitaro's guilt or innocence becomes a metaphor for the horrific death of many non-combatants in the American bombing of Nagasaki. While in Dostoevsky's masterpiece a major issue was the conviction of an innocent man for a crime he did not commit, the darker side of Love in Action considers the fate of those citizens of Japan who were punished for the acts that their government committed in WWII. It turns out that the parallels with the questions raised in the great Russian epic are actually all here, but they are wrapped in an Absurdist drama that echoes the work of the great Dario Fo. Love in Action provides more than an enjoyable night in the theatre; it is a work that merits a level of pondering comparable to that given its illustrious inspiration.

Rated: ★★★★★

Reviewed by J.C.
Photo by Takashi Okamoto

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Map & Location: Rosebery Ave, London EC1R 4TN, UK

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