Theate review: Dolls

Published on Sunday 1 February 2009 21:16

DOLLS TRAMWAY, GLASGOW

THERE was a time when boys and girls would choose a sweetheart in their teens, and remain with that person until death. Today, though, serial relationships are the rule; and as a result, our world is full of walking wounded, carrying the hidden pain that comes with this strange alternation of intimacy and absence, present reality and aching memory.

It's this truth, perhaps, that has made a cult success of Takeshi Kitano's 2002 film Dolls, which tells the story of three pairs of lovers – a couple who share lunches on a park bench, a rock star and her devoted fan, a couple whose separation leads to tragedy – bound together across time, like figures from ancient bunraku puppet-theatre. And now, gifted director Carrie Cracknell, with the NTS Workshop, has created a new stage version of Kitano's film, in which movement, music, visual imagery and language collide to conjure up a strange landscape of sweetness, loss and memory.

Cracknell's staging seems hesitant at first, caught in the old-fashioned awkwardness of an 80s-style merger between text-based theatre and a few predictable dance movements. But as the story of the tragic couple reaches its long crisis, in which the two wander eternity bound by a red cord, the threads of the production gradually come together, on Simon Daw's big Zen garden of a set, to create an indelible impression of some aching, central mystery of connection and loss. The acting is open, soft, intriguing, a touch variable in quality. But the lyricism and wit of the music – by David Paul Jones and Glasgow band Zoey Van Goey – holds the show together, like a red rope of sound linking a fragmenting 21st-century pop culture to all eternity; and leaves the audience genuinely shaken and stirred.