Review: Death Note at The Barbican

As joyful as the idea of musicals may be, more than a few of them are about shuffling off one’s mortal coil. There’s no reason to list them — Sweeney Todd, Les Misérables, Phantom, Miss Saigon — but the Grim Reaper has certainly had his fair share of hit shows.

Death Note is the latest addition, although this musical is already an established award-winning phenomenon in Asia, based on the hugely successful Japanese manga created by  Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata. More than 30 million copies have been sold worldwide.

With a title like Death Note, darkness is obviously part of the deal and, as a complete stranger to manga, this was new territory for me. But it was once new territory for composer Frank Wildhorn too, and with lyricist Jack Murphy and book writer Ivan Menchell, he has transformed the strange, morally complex world into something close to a rock opera, gifting its characters songs that compellingly define them .

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Having only seen charming High Society at the Barbican a few weeks ago, it was incredible to return and find its Philadelphia mansion replaced by Jon Bausor’s ingenious, constantly shifting Tokyo of classrooms, bedrooms and police offices, overlooked by an illuminated terrace inhabited by the Shinigami. They are the supernatural gods of death and that is where the trouble begins.

Brilliant high-school student Light Yagami (Xander Pang) discovers a notebook dropped into the human world by the mischievous, apple-munching Shinigami Ryuk (Telly Leung). Write a person’s name in it and, 40 seconds later, they die. Frustrated by a justice system that allows criminals to escape punishment, Light decides he can do better.

That’s really all you need to know — because what begins as a supernatural thriller very quickly becomes something far more unsettling.

Light believes he can use his extraordinary new power to rid the world of criminals, while the brilliantly Iggy Pop like eccentric detective L (Colin Ryan) is determined to discover who is behind the mysterious deaths. Their battle of wits drives the evening, with stupendous vocals supplied by Stephanie Zaharis as pop sensation Misa and Grace Mouat as her protector Shinigami Rem along with and Paolo Montalban as Light’s policeman father.

But Death Note doesn’t allow you simply to sit back and enjoy the spectacle. It starts asking uncomfortable questions. If you had the power to permanently remove serial killers and murderers from society, would you use it? And who gets to decide who deserves to die? With headlines here dominated by prison overcrowding, early release and the impact on victims’ families, those questions feel unexpectedly close to home.

Being Jewish, the idea of names being written in a book inevitably took me to the Book of Life, particularly with Rosh Hashanah fast approaching. And that’s where I chose to leave it. Far better to think about the righteous than imagine a Jewish version of the Shinigami hovering above us.

To conclude it’s only been  24 hours and I’m still thinking about the show plus I’ve already acquired the Wildhorn soundtrack. Basically Death Note killing it at the Barbican which is also perfectly air-conditioned. More than a few reasons, then, to go.

Death Note is on until 12 September. http://DeathNoteTheMusical.com