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by Tom Morton-Smith, directed by Phelim McDermott

Joe Hisaishi & Royal Shakespeare Company with Nippon TV & Improbable, Gillian Lynne Theatre, London, GBR

March 8, 2025-March 29, 2026

Tatsuo: “Trees and people used to be good friends”

There is a new must-see show for families in London. I was not planning to see My Neighbour Totoro on my theatre trip this year, because the 1988 animated film is one of Hiyao Miyazaki’s masterpieces, and what would be the point of seeing a masterpiece of animation on stage? Yet fellow theatre critic Lynn Slotkin persuaded me to see it, and I’m so glad she did. My Neighbour Totoro is one of the most inventive, most thoroughly delightful shows on stage right now in London. After two sellout runs at the Barbican, it is now playing in the West End. All the expressions of surprise and laughter that kept bursting out around me throughout the show confirmed that it is an extraordinary work of pure theatre that appeals to both old and young.

The show closely follows the plot of the film My Neighbour Totoro (となりのトトロ). In Japan in the 1955, Professor Tatsuo Kusakabe takes his two daughters, Satsuki aged 10 and Mei aged 4, to live in the country. He has bought an old house in order to be near the hospital where his wife and the girls’ mother has been recovering from a long illness. The locals think the house is haunted and the girls soon find out why. Strange spidery soot sprites live there, though, as we learn, if they like you, they move out. Eventually, they do move out. When Mei is alone, she encounters a small spirit and a larger one who leads her to a passage through an ancient camphor tree.

There Mei discovers an enormous version of the smaller spirits and based on the roars he makes thinks his name is Totoro. Tatsuo is not surprised at Mei’s news since beings used to protect the forests all over Japan. As the forests were cut down, these beings began to disappear.

The story consists of two main sequences of events. First, Satsuki finally sees Totoro herself and believes Mei’s story. The girls meet Totoro when he is waiting for a bus and they lend him an umbrella, something he’s never seen before. He gives the girls seeds in return. The second sequence is the disappearance of Mei when she is told she can’t visit her mother. She decides to go to the hospital herself but gets lost. Satsuki and the local villagers search for Mei, fearing the worst, but Satsuki decides to call on Totoro for help, and Totoro does help.

My Neighbour Totoro is the gentle story of two children coming to terms with living in a new environment as well as realizing that their mother may not get well anytime soon. Miyazaki has taken the idea of learning to live in the country to a symbolic level by having all of the forest represented by Totoro and the two little Totoros that accompany him. In Shinto there these spirits are called “kami” (神). They are embodiments of nature and worshipped as such. After Mei tells Tatsuo about Totoro, he goes to the shrine near the camphor tree to thank the “kami” for appearing.

The story may seem too slim to hold the attention for two hours and 40 minutes, but the world created on stage is so captivating that the time simply flies by. Even though the story is not based on forces in conflict as is more usual for drama, the story is about two girls who discover new things about the new world they live in every day. The show itself is structured as a series of increasingly larger, more complex theatrical events. Following Miyazaki’s film writer Tom Morton-Smith and director Phelim McDermott ensure that the world on stage is as new to us minute by minute as it is to Mei and Satsuki.

McDermott’s main method of translation the animation of the film to the stage is through a wide range of puppetry. We have become familiar with plays like War Horse (2007) or Life of Pi (2019) that integrate puppetry into the action. In both cases the puppetry is meant to make puppets representing real creatures appear as lifelike as possible. My Neighbour Totoro takes the uses of puppetry on stage to another level since its goal is to make fantastic creatures of all sorts, and even plants, appear as lifelike as possible. If you go into the play already knowing the film, as I did, you will wonder how anyone could put the giant Totoro on stage, much less the huge flying, twelve-legged Catbus. Well, just sit back and be amazed because famed puppet designer Basil Twist and costume designer Kimie Nakano have found supremely inventive theatrical ways of meeting all the challenges the film presents.

The method decided on by McDermott, Twist and Nakano is to use an ensemble of 20 members to function as puppeteers, stage hands and occasionally as characters. These performers Nakano has named “kazego” (風衣), meaning “wind clothes”, since they can sometimes be seen and sometimes not. She derived the term from “kurogo” (黒衣), meaning “black clothes”, the word the puppet manipulators in bunraku or stage hands in kabuki, whose all-black garb is meant to signify invisibility. Here, Nakano has given the kazego all-indigo garb to which they can add a few accessories when they become characters like farmers or villagers.

To make the European audience familiar with this Japanese tradition, when we first meet the kazego, they show us their faces. When they begin work as puppeteers or stage hands, they lower their face coverings to signify their invisibility. As when watching bunraku or kabuki, it is surprising how quickly you forget the helping all-black figures are even there.

Sometimes one kazego will manipulate multiple puppets as in the case of the soot sprites where one kazego holds a device in each hand with ten long rods ending in what look like dishevelled black pompons. Twist’s coordination of the sprites that move about like a murmuration of starlings is magical to behold. In another instance, one kazego will manipulate more than one of the Ōgaki family’s chickens. Twist has hilariously choreographed the kazego to make the flock of chickens run about in seeming chaos.

Sometimes a kazego will be assigned to only one character. This is the case with Totoro’s two smaller companions Shōtotoro and Chūtotoro. Although each puppet has only two rods as controls, the rage of emotions that the kazego can have the puppets manifest, as well as the difference between them, is a constant delight. The little white Shōtotoro, looking like a cross between a rabbit and a penguin, is the scaredier of the two, prone to shivering in fear before fleeing for safety. The much larger blue-and white Chūtotoro, is less frightenable, though both can nearly be blown over by on of Totoro’s roars.

There are four sizes of Totoro, the largest as big as a house that takes up a major part of the stage area. The largest one takes a whole crew to operate, some inside the creature, some outside, to help it walk, move its head, blink and open its mouth. When it roars a separate kazego must be needed just to waggle its huge tongue. I’ve never seen so big a puppet. Totoro is a furry, egg-shed being with large round eyes, whiskers like a cat and two trowel-shaped ears. Again, tightly choreographed teamwork gives this fantastic being life and personality. In an iconic scene, Satsuki, Mei and Totoro are all caught in the rain at the same bus stop. Mei lends Totoro an umbrella, but since Totoro has never seen one before he hilariously does not know how to use it. The point is we laugh at Totoro as a character, not as a puppet.

The most spectacular of the puppets is certainly the Catbus. As it happens, spirits like Totoro take the Catbus to travel quickly from place to place. The Catbus has the face, body and tail of an orange-and-black striped cat but has twelve legs and windows in its sides, front and back like a bus. This creature also requires an entire crew to operate and is a type of inflatable puppet the likes of which were completely new to me. The effects the crew achieved with this puppet boggle the mind.

The stage is fitted with a revolve and that is where we first see the close to life-sized house that Tatsuo has bought. The revolve shows us the front on one side and the inside on the other, but depending on the scene, the kazego can take apart and reassemble the house to emphasize separate rooms or to create the house of the Ōgakis, the Kusakabes nearest human neighbours. Through numerous ingenious methods we see the kazego act as farmers and see their plants grow. The most impressive use of the revolve, plants and the kazego is when Mei gets lost in a corn field and rushes in every direction to find her way to her mother’s hospital. As the revolve turns, the kazego rearrange rows of corn that Mei plunges through again and again as she becomes ever more disoriented.

On top of everything, McDermott highlights the theatrical construct of an already highly metatheatrical production. In one scene, the two-dimensional bus for humans (not the Catbus) arrives and the kazego carry the driver a bit too far ahead so that he overshoots the outline of the bus. This gets a laugh because it highlights the artificiality of what happens on stage that we have become so invested in.

The advantage that the stage version of Totoro has over the film is its greater emphasis on human interactions. We understand better how the Kusakabe family works as a family and how, happy as they may try to be, the shadow of their mother’s illness is always present. The Ōgaki family is granted much more presence than in the film with greater rapport shown between Granny and her grandson Kanta. Dai Tabuchi presents Tatsuo as a wonderfully warm character. He brings out the both the professor’s propensity to instruct along with a certain absent-mindedness. We see that he takes care of his daughters, but he also needs his daughters to take care of him. Tabuchi illustrates that Tatsuo’s wife’s illness so preys on him that he finds it difficult to talk about, much less contemplate her death.

Ami Okumura Jones shows the older daughter Satsuki as a boisterous girl who chafes under being the substitute mother of the family. Jones frequently reveals how Satsuki is constantly caught between the desire simply to be young and carefree like Mei and the duty to watch and protect her.

Victoria Chen is absolutely charming as Mei. This is one of the few times when an adult is able to act like a 4-year-old without relying on sickly cutesiness as a prop. Chen is able to infuse us with Mei’s wonder over both simple and marvellous things, her confusion, her fear, her joy. Until Chen’s outstanding performance I don’t recall seeing such a young child so accurately portrayed on stage.

In the Ōgaki family Jaqueline Tate serves as a kind, calming presence as Granny and in no way is as grotesque looking as her character in the film. Steven Nguyen is very funny as her grandson Kanta. In the film Kanta is so socially awkward that I thought the cause might be pathological. In the stage version, Nguyen makes quite clear that Kanta is simply extremely shy and Nguyen allows a whole-hearted comedy to arise from his character and Kanta’s pained attempts to speak to Satsuki. In fact, we cheer Kanta on as he gradually gains more confidence around Satsuki.

The stage version of My Neighbour Totoro is a feast of theatricality. It is so heartening so see a family show that generates its excitement through all the physical possibilities of theatre and human-powered effects rather than through projections or computer-generated effects which have become the all-too-easy methods theatres use. The substantial use of puppetry of all kinds and of invisible kazego makes the audience feel it is in the same space where the magical transformation of inanimate to animate is happening, not simply watching images on a screen. In many ways, the use of the kazego in all aspects of the production better reflects Miyazaki’s view of kami or spirits as inherent in all aspects of nature than does the film. They are the forces that make soot spirits, butterflies and fireflies flit about, they animate Totoro and his companions, they make plants grow and they even move buildings and vehicles. Watching My Neighbour Totoro on stage is entering a magic world alive with benign, unseen forces all directed toward inspiring you with wonder.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Victoria Chen as Mei, Dai Tabuchi as Tatsuo and Ami Okumura Jones as Satsuki; Ami Okumura Jones as Satsuki with Soot Sprites and kazego; Steven Nguyen as Kanta with chickens and kazego; Victoria Chen as Mei, in the forest. © 2025 Manuel Harlan. Note: The RSC provides no photos of Totoro, his companions or the Catbus. You have to attend the show to see them.

For tickets visit: totoroshow.com.