Combining the aesthetic of late 12th Century Japan, Shakespeare’s classic teen drama Romeo and Juliet and the music of classic rock band Queen is something that really shouldn’t work, but Hideki Noda’s A Night At The Kabuki somehow welds all of these very different together into something memorable and unique.

The show originally came to Sadler’s Wells Theatre last year, but a recording of the show can be found online for a limited time only at anightatthekabuki.com. At the time of writing, it is running till the 30th of November 2023. 

It is a gloriously weird affair. The elements glide perfectly into each other in a way that really shouldn’t work, and completely reimagines various parts of the narrative to not only make the inclusion of Queen’s A Night At The Opera make sense as a soundtrack but also to make Romeo and Juliet less of a tragedy and more of a straight-up drama.

It’s not just that the Montagues and Capulets are renamed Minamoto and Taira; it’s more that the entire reason for the events of the drama are flipped on their head, and we quickly learn that this is more a feudal conspiracy than simply two star-crossed lovers being stupid.  

This sort of strange mash-up is what we’ve come to expect from Hideki Noda, whose previous projects include the darkly comedic tale of xenophobic hysteria Red Demon and the stage adaptation of the manga Hanshin: Half-God, a surreal tale about conjoined twins. A Night At The Kabuki plays things a little safer in terms of story, drawing on Shakespeare’s classic teen drama as its model, but only just.

The staging is bold in the sense that it is stark and simple most of the time, with stunning displays of motion and timing that send the entire thing into unique and memorable territory.

 A Night At The Kabuki is something special, a delicious blend of rock music, Samurai nostalgia, Eastern style, Western brutality and creative chaos, it should not be missed. Run, don’t walk to anightatthekabuki.com to see it before it’s gone.