Brilliant but so baffling

On a dimly lit, scaffolded stage, decorated with a few domestic props, a gliding shuttle service of video cameras and giant film projections, the director of Complicite, Simon McBurney, hatches fresh, strange theatrical magic.

Modern technology assists in the representation of an alienated Japanese world possessed by technological know-how.

The Elephant Vanishes, which dazzled critics at its London premiere in 2003, dramatises three short stories by the revered, weird Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami.

I was away during last year's run of the show, which is again deftly performed by Japanese actors, with English surtitles placed too high above the stage to make for easy reading.

The revival leaves me once more admiring McBurney's rare ability, one he shares with Robert Lepage, to exploit the stage's modern army of mixed media effects, thereby conveying what words on the page less dramatically state.

Murakami deals with magic disturbances, dislocations and detachments in isolated individuals who, at first sight, seem flamboyantly conventional. The boundaries of realism are burst. People behave absurdly or are reduced to nightmareish states of mind.

The well-drilled performers, amid the flash and dash of screen images, odd sounds and diverse music from Japanese composers to Shostakovich and Brian Eno, mime and act scenes the surtitles describe. The unpredictable or unexpected keeps happening.

An insomniac sees three doppelgangers calmly sitting close to her. A narrator hovers on wires above the action looking down on his own self. A blaze of light envelops the audience as the last, defining words of the evening are intoned. "Our world is so cruelly bright we see nothing."

A failure to realise that life sometimes defies rationality characterises both the narrative of an insomniac woman and the title story, The Elephant Vanishes.

A young man who publicises kitchen equipment is obsessed by the inexplicable vanishing of a zoo keeper and an elderly elephant, whose ancient eye keeps gleaming from a TV monitor.