My Neighbour Totoro on stage: ‘just as enchanting’ as the film

The 1988 Japanese animated film My Neighbour Totoro is a modern classic, about two girls who move to the countryside and encounter troll-like spirits who draw them into a mystical realm, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. This world-premiere stage version is already a “monster” box-office smash for the RSC; and it’s a pleasure to report that it fully lives up to the hype.

Tom Morton-Smith’s stage adaptation is directed by Phelim McDermott, with music by Joe Hisaishi that augments his original film soundtrack with “soothing and stirring” songs. And it “beautifully” retains all that fans loved about the film: it has a “gentle, philosophical pace”, a “beguiling strangeness”. It’s a “triumph – a vital power surge of Anglo-Japanese creative electricity fit for these soul-sapped times”.

How do you adapt an “iconic” Studio Ghibli film that is widely considered an “unsurpassed feat of fantasy animation”, asked Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. “Just like this, it would seem.” McDermott’s stage version is not an exact replica – but it is “just as enchanting and perhaps more emotionally impactful”. The relationship between the sisters, Satsuki and Mei, and their father are caught tenderly, and their “understated yearning” for their hospitalised mother is quietly moving.

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The set, designed by Tom Pye, is as mobile and multi-faceted as origami: each scene breaks apart to form another “entrancing” world. The puppetry, by Basil Twist, is magical. And Totoro himself, a gigantic but charming beast, is “formidable, eerie, comic and endearing” all at once.

As a visual feast, My Neighbour Totoro is “matchless”, said David Benedict in Variety. The design team has “let rip”, and the result is “grand-scale theatrical storytelling”. But newcomers to the story seeking a “satisfying, well-paced plot” will be disappointed.

The pace is a little slow, agreed Sarah Hemming in the FT. It’s perhaps a little too faithful to the film in that respect: “it could be shorter, meatier and freer”. Even so, this is a “tender, remarkably beautiful family show” – a “gorgeous, uplifting” exploration of the world “as seen through a child’s eyes”.

RSC, Barbican Theatre, London EC2. Until 21 January