A Forest Breathes: My Neighbour Totoro at the Gillian Lynne Theatre

Children bring a particular quality of attention to the natural world, an openness to the idea that a tree might be inhabited, that the boundary between the living and the spiritual is thinner than adults are trained to believe. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s My Neighbour Totoro, now settled at the Gillian Lynne Theatre following two record-breaking runs at the Barbican, is precisely about that quality. Examined through a scientific lens, it is also a surprisingly rigorous meditation on ecosystems, developmental psychology, and the mechanics of life itself.

Credit: Manuel Harlan, 2026

Tom Morton-Smith’s adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved 1988 Studio Ghibli film follows sisters Satsuki and Mei as they relocate with their father to the Japanese countryside to be closer to their mother, who is recovering in a rural hospital. Exploring their new home, the girls encounter a world of spirits: soot sprites that skitter through forgotten rooms, a magical twelve-legged Catbus and the great forest guardian himself, Totoro. When Mei goes missing, Satsuki must reach across the membrane between the human and spiritual worlds to find her. It is a story with no real villain – only the quiet anxiety of illness, childhood fear and a family holding itself together at the edges.

Miyazaki’s film is soaked in ecology, and the stage production honours this. The landscape depicted – 1950s Japanese countryside where human settlements and ancient forests exist in close proximity – is what biologists call an ecotone: the dynamic meeting place between habitats. Totoro, slumbering in the hollow of a camphor tree, operates on the timescale of the forests rather than families, benevolent in the way that an ancient woodland is benevolent toward everything that shelters under it.

Production designer Tom Pye takes ecological seriousness to heart. Rejecting plastic leaves as incompatible with the production’s spirit, he built the stage from real wood throughout – oak veneer over a steel base, with surfaces treated using shou sugi ban, the traditional Japanese charring technique. The result is a stage that carries nature in its grain and texture rather than merely representing it.

The soot sprites (susuwatari) are particularly rich biologically: photosensitive organisms clustering in dark corners and scattering from light. A biologist would recognise this as negative phototaxis – the same mechanism driving woodlice under logs. The show calls it magic. Science calls it life. These are not incompatible positions.

But where the production enters truly extraordinary territory is through its use of puppetry.

Puppetry designer and director Basil Twist – whose credits include the Dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – recognised that Totoro could not be achieved with rigid materials. A creature defined by the desire to make you “want to fall asleep on his belly” must yield, must breathe. Building a prototype in his San Francisco garden during the pandemic, Twist arrived at an inflatable structure: simultaneously massive and soft, displacing air when touched and recovering like biological tissue. This is a materials science decision as much as an artistic one. High surface deformability, low apparent mass, textural warmth – these are precisely the properties that trigger comfort responses in the human nervous system. Totoro’s body is engineered to activate a neurological preference that was established in infancy. You believe in him partly because your body has been told to.

The prototypes were refined at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in Los Angeles, where precision engineering was layered onto what began as garden-shed intuition. The best puppetry, like the best biology, starts with a rough solution and refines toward elegance.

For the wider creature ensemble, Twist and costume designer Kimie Nakano developed an entirely new performance approach they called Kazego: Japanese for “wind spirits.” Puppeteers in dark blue costumes operate the creatures on long visible wires, making no attempt at concealment. This is a radical biomechanical choice: it transfers the visible effort of locomotion from puppet to performer, and our brains – attuned to reading biological intention in human movement – interpret that effort as the creature’s own vitality. The mechanism is exposed, and the exposure deepens the illusion. As Twist has noted, this mirrors Japanese animism itself: spirits are everywhere and mostly invisible, separated from the living only by the capacity to perceive them.

The Catbus pushes this further. Its coordinated multi-performer mechanics produce a galloping twelve-legged organism whose limb-phase relationships echo real problems in animal biomechanics – solved, as insects solve them, through rigorously rehearsed physical grammar that only reveals itself when you stop and ask how it is being done at all.

Threaded through all of this is Joe Hisaishi’s score – the emotional skeleton of the original film, here given new life in Will Stuart’s orchestration, performed nightly by a live band in the pit. Hisaishi’s music has always worked like a natural system: themes emerge, branch, recombine and return transformed, the way ecological processes cycle through seasons. Heard live rather than through speakers, the difference is visceral. The orchestra breathes with the stage rather than accompanying it.

My Neighbour Totoro at the Gillian Lynne Theatre places biology, psychology, and engineering in the service of something that resists scientific reduction: the specific grief of a child who cannot help the person they love most and the consolation of discovering the world is wider than that grief. Certain large-scale effects tip briefly toward spectacle over intimacy, but these are small hesitations in a production that otherwise achieves something genuinely rare.

When Totoro opens his enormous mouth in a booming roar, and you find you have been holding your breath, you are not experiencing magic as opposed to science. You are experiencing science at its furthest edge: astonishing, provisional, and alive.

By Lily Pagano, June 18, 2026.

Edited by Zhitong Li.