Complicite's latest trick

At its best, Complicite's work provokes a pulse of excitement in the stomach and the sudden sense that the brain cells are ablaze, as on stage a dazzlingly choreographed whirl of ideas and images lifts conceptual theatre to the profoundly philosophical.

Last time the company appeared at the Barbican, this was not the case - a theatrical meditation on Shostakovich seemed frustratingly ephemeral - but now a vanishing elephant, an insomniac and a poignantly empty refrigerator mark a triumphant return to form.

Director Simon McBurney went to Tokyo for his latest theatrical vision, which is based on three short stories by Haruki Murakami, arguably Japan's most popular literary export. Murakami's deceptively simplistic style mixes everyday banality with poetic absurdism, yet in his narrative, say, about a man who stages a hold-up at a McDonald's with his wife, or a woman who spends her nights reading Anna Karenina because she cannot sleep, an obvious yet profoundly beautiful truth emerges about the chaos of the mind beneath everyday routines.

The visual tricks are vintage Complicite. Screens sliding across the stage with different images projected on to them bring fevered restlessness to the action, while the all-Japanese cast emphasises both the artifice and the magic of theatre. On one occasion they hauntingly imitate elephants with the help of chairs, on another they matter-of-factly portray a scene in a highly organised kitchen display shop.

This latter location forms the humorous crux of this work, a deliberately kitsch comment on society's need for everything to fit into its proper place: "The most important point is unity." The pictures that linger, however, are the man gazing down from a boat to look at an imaginary volcano below water, or the woman watching the front of her fridge as it turns into a page from a book, as Complicite wittily and poetically awakens the hauntingly irrational mystery that continually subverts humans' superficial need for order.

Until 6 July. Box office: 0845 120 7550.

The Elephant Vanishes