NARAKU
The Coronet Theatre
★★★½
“a beautiful if slightly distant performance”
Naraku, Japanese for ‘Abyss’, opens with a visceral atmospheric statement and pretty much stays with it from there on in. Brought to us by Dance Company Lasta, it entrances and unnerves with equal intensity. We enter the auditorium to a man with a stunning hair / beard combo (not dramatically relevant but thought you ought to know) sat determinedly at his desk, backstage centre. He is immovable, striking. Then the first blackout comes, and the ballet commences. I won’t run through each sequence and performance in turn, partly because that would make for an arduous read, but also because the play itself functions so much as a whole, each actor (bar perhaps the protagonist) morphing from villain to victim to unnerving tertiary spirit with liquid ease.
And indeed liquid is perhaps an apt adjective for the performance as a whole. The primary strength of Naraku, amongst many, is its staggering physical beauty; choreographed by Yoshimitsu Kushida. Each of the dancers move with such grace and yet such power and raw humanity. I have found that ballets which reduce to a collection of delicate white swans prancing without a care in the world can sometimes lose an audience, and Naraku seems to know this (as any production titled ‘The Abyss’ presumably would), opting instead to stretch the body to impossible, primal limits. Performers crawl across the stage like malevolent spiders, pursue with cruel brutishness, stalk, scream, flail frenetically as if they’re drowning. They are vulnerable, but more importantly, powerful, which extends to their facial acting. It’s tempting in movement pieces to let the body do the talking, and whilst the actors certainly communicate through their manipulated physicality, they don’t let their expression go by the wayside; rather, they contort their faces into almost grotesque pictures, capturing the spectrum and extent of human emotion, passion and pain with ease.
The play’s protagonist (the man descending into this peculiar abyss), played beautifully by Satoshi Nakagawa, is perhaps the best illustration of this acting ability. In various sequences, he fights for a scorned lover against a brutish opponent with completely believable desperation, then receives an intense but pleasurable massage from said opponent, before returning to crushing grief which shrinks him within himself, screaming, laughing hysterically, only to then burst out from this misery in an impassioned call for redemption. All the performers are superb throughout, and are the primary reason for the play’s beauty.
However, this is not to negate the technical facets of the performance. The lighting is used with palpable intention and executed with acute precision. Every facet of the minimalist set design (two chairs and an ornate desk) are considered in each palette; sharp red gels reflect of the tips of chairs to create almost satanic horns, a soft orange wash flattens everything into a pleasurable simplicity. Tension and release and dictated just as much by the lighting as anything else, including the sound. The soundtracks sometimes veer slightly into the melodramatic, but largely are very atmospheric and tasteful. Indeed, the most impressive facet of the show’s sound design is its purposeful absence; at the business end of certain sequences, the brooding strings and piano chords fade out, so all we can hear is the slapping of flesh and rasping breaths. This is notable in climactic moments such as the aforementioned desk man’s eventual movement and subsequent abuse at the hand of (the character of) Mana Tazaki. She is the only speaking actress in the piece, and she questions and berates the protagonist(s) (if we’re to take them as iterations of each other) with undeniable flair.
My main gripe with the piece, however, is that, for all this beauty, I didn’t feel emotionally invested or really engaged at anything more than an aesthetic level. The titular abyss never really feels explored. The depths aren’t sunk to, at least not in such a way that makes any redemption feel cathartic. There’s no tangible emotional arc beyond the immediate concept – or at least not one I could discern – and the piece suffers as a result. Its short-ish running time of 80 minutes is necessary; had it gone on any longer, the lack of narrative stakes and audience empathy would have been a more pressing issue. As it is, however, it makes for a beautiful if slightly distant performance, filled with enough evocative images (such as an eerie two-headed monster created by two of the female presenting dancers) to keep you entranced.
Naraku is conceived and executed stunningly, and if abstract movement pieces exploring the depths of the human psyche are your bag, then I can’t recommend it enough.
NARAKU
The Coronet Theatre
Reviewed on 19th September 2025
by Horatio Holloway
Previously reviewed at this venue:
MEDEA | ★★★★ | June 2025
EINKVAN | ★★★★★ | May 2025
PANDORA | ★★★★ | February 2025
STRANGER THAN THE MOON | ★★★ | December 2024
U-BU-SU-NA | ★★★★★ | November 2024
THE BELT | ★★★★★ | September 2024
THE BECKETT TRILOGY | ★★★★★ | June 2024
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER | ★★★ | September 2023
