Review: TATTOOER, Charing Cross Theatre

In something of a culture shock, Japanese playwright, Takuya Keneshima adapts Japanese author, Junichiro Tanizaki’s, short story of a troubled tattooist and his compliant client for the London stage. Though tattooing, post-Beckham, has gone mainstream, this play takes a very non-mainstream approach to its protagonist’s existential crisis. What to make of it becomes the key question in mind at the curtain.

Leo Ashizawa gives us a tattoo artist with some menace and a side order of fetishism, especially in an early scene that comprised a lot of nudge-nudge-wink-wink allusions to needles penetrating bodies. Like so much else in the play, the tone wasn't clear so it didn’t really land, neither pantomimeishly funny enough to provoke laughs nor self-consciously literate enough to allow the metaphor to make, err, deeper points. 

He circles two sisters, played by Aki Nakagawa and Mao Aono, who alternate between physical and verbal violence and submissive deference to their artist, not quite models, not quite muses. They also seem to merge into one woman at times, but at others separate completely, the backstory of scar tissue, incurred when one saved the other in an earthquake, introduced but not developed. 

After an interval in which renowned Japanese ink-brush painter, Gaku Azuma, creates a work on both a body and the stage floor, an Englishman, played by Nozomi de Lencquesaing, arrives to get his own tattoo. He is disappointed to find that the world famous artist, now blinded but claiming to see the world with a new, improved vision, will not be applying the needle, but directing his muse/model/assistant. Talk ensues.

It proves difficult to pin down character, narrative arc or jeopardy as the script mainly calls for speeches rather than what one might call conversations. Just when the familiar components of drama come into view, they’re subverted. Director, Hogara Kawai, is not afraid to break the fourth wall, but it’s not done with any consistency, so an already disorienting work loses even more of the centring it so needs. Anyone choosing to see a production with this laudable level of ambition can expect a challenge, but it shouldn't be as tough as this.

The programme calls for those with tattoos of their own to see the play, so I’ll leave the last word with someone who has a few and would like more - “That was less a play and more a piece of performance art”. I can’t improve on that verdict.

Tattooer is at Charing Cross Theatre until 26 October

Photo Credits: Mark Senior

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