By James Hadley in London

I've written previously about my first experience of a Theatre du Complicite show, 'A Disappearing Number'. Recently I had a second experience, a show called Shun-kin staged at the Barbican.

This was a collaboration between Complicite's Artistic Director Simon McBurney (generally accepted as one of the most visionary UK directors of his generation) and Setagaya Public Theatre, a Japanese company based in Tokyo.

Simon McBurney collaborated with Setagaya Public Theatre on a previous Complicite show called 'The Elephant Vanishes', which was staged at the Barbican in 2003. A colleague from the Arts Council with whom I went to see Shun-kin told me 'The Elephant Vanishes' had seemed to try and be as accessible to a UK audience as it could, whereas 'Shun-kin' was far more innately Japanese. To the extent that the whole show was performed in Japanese, with English surtitles.

The experience was very much like watching a Japanese arthouse film, as the narrative gradually unfolded with graceful visual metaphors about life and relationships - I often find that Japanese films take a more meditative pace than English or American, and so it was with this production. Things took the time they took, and everything was meticulously crafted with an appearance of effortless ease in the end product. Complicite generally avoid intervals, I'm told, as they feel it interferes with the internal rhythm and experience of the production. Thankfully the Barbican have some of the most spacious and comfortable seats in London theatre, as otherwise the uninterrupted two hours would have been challenging.

'Shun-kin' is one of those timeless love stories that feel archetypal, and was based around a courtly ideal of love between a female virtuoso player of the shamisen (a traditional Japanese string instrument) and the young man who is assigned to her as a servant when she is still an infant, and remains with her until she dies. The twist is that this musician, whose name is Shunkin, and is extremely beautiful, is also completely blind, and so relies upon the servant's assistance. Due to her talents, she is also quite spoilt as a child, and this leads to a sadistic streak being present in her relationship with the servant - she counters her vulnerability with a propensity to exploit her power over him as a servant. The servant is besotted by her, so makes no complaint when their relationship becomes sexual behind closed doors, despite Shun-kin continuing to treat him as her servant.

It's an intriguing revision of the standard dynamics of romance, due to its particular blend of trust, vulnerability and exploitation. Ultimately, when Shun-kin's beauty is tarnished in an accident, the servant blinds himself to spare her the humiliation of knowing he sees her scarred face.

The only flaw in the production is that the stage pictures are so continually exquisite that you don't want to keep tearing your eyes away every few moments to read the surtitles. The all Japanese cast moved with the precision of brain surgeons from evoking, with nothing but a few sticks, the screen doors and dimensions of a traditional Japanese domestic interior, to evocations with folded pieces of white paper of fluttering birds. The physical choral work was flawless, so that your eye constantly moved where it was meant to go, as if only seeing the images being formed and not the performers creating them.

The most effective theatrical device of the production was in its depiction of the eponymous Shun-kin. As an infant she was represented by a puppet, manipulated by two female puppeteers, one of whom performed her voice - and so expressively that her facial expressions became a sort of extension of the puppet too. Then, as the character aged, the puppet was performed with one of the puppeteers providing the character's now human arms, and in the next stage a human actor wearing a mask was manipulated as the puppet. The transitions from one stage to the next were so smooth that several times I did a double-take to realise that the puppet was no longer as much of an inanimate object as it had been before. This posed all sorts of interesting images of manipulation, and of the cultivation of an untouchably aloof persona, such as Shun-kin showed to the world.

It was the crafting of the storytelling that most impressed overall, including a clever device of having a voiceover artist recording the narration of the story live onstage throughout. This wily older woman was a delightful character who, in a few rest breaks from the story, would call her lover on her cellphone to debate whether their affair was over or not. Like many good stories, the different layers of the work reflected and echoed each other in different ways so that you could make all sorts of readings.