Review: Death Note, Barbican ★★★

Death Note, an anime based on a Japanese manga, was a brooding but funny journey through not only a fictionalised Japanese world of shinigami (死神 , death gods) but also the intensity of Japanese high school culture with its exceedingly high expectations plus its workplace structures of rigid hierarchies. The anime has an exceptional soundtrack, written primarily by Yoshihisa Hirano and Hideki Taniuchi. A carefully varied mix of orchestra, choir, sacred-sounding choral music, sounds and silences, it gives a deep added richness to the story.

Running at 37 episodes, combining this into a musical was always going to be a challenge. However, the crushingly disappointing thing about the Death Note musical currently running at the Barbican is not how the story has been trimmed, it is how many of the core elements of the anime’s success have been lost.

The Japanese producers brought in Frank Wildhorn, a master of American power-belting to compose the musical. Instead of deeply differentiated music (L, repetitive like a logical clock ticking; Light, soaring church choirs and apocalyptic strings as he descends into his God complex) that let us immediately know which brain we were in, we are served formulaic pop-rock that follows the same pattern each time and everything merges into one.

The sense of the high-stakes schooling is also lost. One brief classroom scene seems as casual as an American high school. But this is the land of “Yontou Goraku” (四当五落) – the exam hell saying that four hours sleep will see you pass but five hours will see you fail. My Japanese high-school classmates regularly said this to me when I was an exchange student there, while I was indulging in eight hours a night and watching them fall asleep in class around me. In 2025, 532 elementary, junior-high and high school students died by suicide and the time around September 1 – after the long summer break – is particulary high risk. The necessity for long hours of study also leads to isolation and time alone, all of which helps make Light’s descent into mania more easy to understand. The musical does not give us this insight.

Equally, the Japanese office hierarchy is also gone. By losing subtle cultural elements, such as bowing to each other as they greet, we also lose the information that speaking out to a superior would be intensely difficult. Without this, it is hard to understand why none of Light’s father’s staff even gently suggest that – maybe, just maybe – a small look at whether his son Light is culpable for a series of murders would be wise.

What is successful is the costuming of the shinigami, Ryuk in particular is charmingly eccentric and other-wordly. Jon Bausor’s industrial set enables the shinigami to sit in a realm above the human world. Office spaces and bedrooms also enter from the wings and a rotating stage successfully adds to a sense of movement in main scenes.

Much use is made of video design (Akhila Krishnan): TV scenes, the iconic notes written in the death note book to kill and social media entries. Unfortunately, from the gallery, much of this was obscured. The projected streets scene and pouring rain which were visible lower down were very effectively evoked central Tokyo.

A fine cast has been assembled here though they are somewhat boxed in by the music choices they are given to perform. Death Note ultimately brings a show at a successful visual scale with some powerhouse songs. However, the nuance and cultural specificity of the original anime has unfortunately been lost in translation.

Images: Manuel Harlan

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Review: Death Note, Barbican ★★★

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