My Neighbour Totoro will close at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in January 2027. The producers have confirmed there will be no further extension, so there is now a fixed number of performances left. Before the final months of the run, we sat down with Victoria Chen and Helen Chong, who play Mei and Satsuki on the London stage, and over an hour they gave us plenty of reasons to see the show while it is still here.
The show itself is well established. The Royal Shakespeare Company, composer Joe Hisaishi, Improbable and Nippon TV turned Miyazaki’s 1988 film into a stage production with live music, full size puppets and a visible ensemble of spirits, and it won six Olivier Awards in 2023, more than any other production that year.
Our interview took place on the day of the show’s 600th London performance. Victoria has been there for almost all of them, having played Mei since the West End run opened in March 2025. Helen joined in the cast change in March 2026 and is closing in on 200.
Who are Victoria Chen and Helen Chong?
Victoria Chen plays Mei, the four year old sister. She moved from a working acting career in Singapore to London, auditioned to understudy the role, did not get it, and was asked back to audition again. That second time she was cast as Mei outright. She has played the part since the West End run opened in March 2025.
Helen Chong plays Satsuki, the ten year old who holds the family together while their mother is in hospital. She joined in the March 2026 cast change, in her West End principal debut, and came to the production without having grown up on Studio Ghibli at all.
The run in brief
- October 2022: world premiere at the Barbican Theatre, sold out
- 2023: six Olivier Award wins, more than any other production that year
- Late 2023 to early 2024: returns to the Barbican
- March 2025: transfers to the Gillian Lynne Theatre, Victoria Chen joins as Mei
- March 2026: cast change, Helen Chong joins as Satsuki
- 3 January 2027: final London performance, confirmed
How two actors become sisters on stage
In My Neighbour Totoro, Satsuki is ten and holds the family together while their mother is in hospital. Mei is four and does exactly what she wants. Playing that bond convincingly is at the heart of what the two of them share on stage, and it started under pressure. When Helen joined, she was stepping into her West End principal debut in a production its audience already adored.
She credits Victoria, Dai Tabuchi, who has played the girls’ father Tatsuo since the original Barbican run, and Steven Nguyen, who plays Kanta, with helping her settle in and reminding her to have fun with it. One phrase from director Phelim McDermott’s rehearsals has stuck with her:
“We work with this idea of an atmosphere of ease. Sometimes before we go on stage, Vic will just say it: atmosphere of ease. It sounds like we’re just saying words, but it reminds me that it’s okay to trust yourself, that it will come. We work so much on instinct and feeling in this show.”
Away from the theatre, the two of them are less sure who looks after whom. Victoria is the more experienced company member, but she is also a younger sister in real life, so she can never tell whether she is mentoring Helen or simply being loyal to another older sister. “I feel like maybe we’re twins,” she says.
Audience members regularly tell them they seem like real sisters, and neither can point to anything they did to build that. Victoria credits Tom Morton-Smith’s adaptation instead, which puts the sisterhood into dozens of small moments of bickering and banter rather than one big scene. “It makes just saying the words enough.”
Satsuki and Mei both mean May, and Miyazaki nearly wrote one girl
Both sisters are named after the same month. Satsuki is the old Japanese name for the fifth month of the year, and Mei is the phonetic spelling of the English “May”. The story takes place in May, and the show keeps returning to that season: springtime, new life, new beginnings.
There is a bigger piece of history behind the names too. Before My Neighbour Totoro became the film we know, Miyazaki planned it around a single girl. She appears on the original 1988 poster, standing at a rainy bus stop beside Totoro: a child who looks like Satsuki but wears pigtails like Mei, and who exists in no version of the finished film. When the project was expanded, he split her into two sisters.
Victoria brought this up herself, happy to share it, along with her own reading of why he did it:
“My own interpretation is that Miyazaki-san may have wanted to explore this age of knowing and not knowing. The way you know and don’t know at four, and the way you know and don’t know at ten, is so different. Between them, Satsuki and Mei possess so much courage and curiosity, so much love and openness. Perhaps he found it interesting to explore how those things show up at different points in a girl’s life. He’s got great protagonists in this story.”
“The way you know and don’t know at four, and the way you know and don’t know at ten, is so different.”
How seven characters became a cast of 27
When the creative team first started planning the adaptation, they were thinking the way most productions think: in named characters. Two sisters, a father, a mother, a granny, a neighbour boy. Then Kimie Nakano, the production’s Japanese costume designer, who went on to win the 2023 Olivier Award for her work on this show, said something in passing that changed the shape of the whole staging.
Victoria clearly loves telling this story:
“She mentioned offhand that in Japan we believe so much in spirits, that there are spirits in everything, even the house, even the trees. And that gave the team the idea that maybe this whole story should be told by the spirits. All of a sudden it stopped being about seven characters on stage. Now we’ve got a cast of 27, and we can’t imagine the adaptation without them any more. They are the storytellers.”
That idea, that a spirit can live in anything from a tree to a household object, is exactly the worldview the film itself grew out of, and it is the same thread that runs through Miyazaki’s wider work on nature and the spirit world. It now runs through the whole production. The ensemble performs as kazego, wind spirits dressed in blue, who carry the forest on in pieces, drive the scene changes and operate Basil Twist’s puppets in full view of the audience.
Nothing is hidden, and it works because the audience accepts the visible puppeteers as part of the world almost immediately. Victoria rates them as highly as anyone in the building: “Some of the best puppetry across the world.”
A Joe Hisaishi score played live at every performance
The stage production exists because Joe Hisaishi wanted it to happen. The composer behind the most loved themes in the Studio Ghibli songbook proposed the adaptation himself and serves as its executive producer, and his score is played live at every performance, newly orchestrated for the theatre by Will Stuart. If you already know the pieces Hisaishi wrote for the 1988 film, you will hear the main themes arrive arranged for a theatre pit rather than a recording studio.
That matters a great deal to Victoria, because she came to this show as a fan first. She grew up on Ghibli, watched the original cast from the audience at the Barbican, and arrived expecting to be disappointed:
“I am one of the biggest sceptics in the world. I didn’t want to watch a stage adaptation of Ghibli. And the show starts with a song, and by the time the first note played, I sobbed. This show understands what it means to put Ghibli on stage more than anything else I’ve seen. Ever.”
“By the time the first note played, I sobbed.”
Charred wood, post war frocks and the right telephone
Neither actor was ever told to copy the film, and both credit Phelim McDermott with deciding early on that his version should stand on its own rather than imitate the animation. That is a large part of why people who have never seen the anime enjoy it on its own terms. Victoria says fans at the stage door often insist the show is exactly like the film, yet when she rewatches the film, very little is literally the same. She describes the production as a love letter to the film: the essence, the spirit and the soul are kept, without scene by scene imitation.
What creates that feeling is a level of physical detail that many in the audience may never consciously notice:
“You can tell even down to the way they burn the wood. There’s a wood burning technique from Japan used to create the houses and the forest. It’s in the way they design the lighting to stream through the leaves and branches and hit the floor a certain way. It’s in how Mei and Satsuki dress in westernised clothing because of the changes in post war Japan, next to the traditional clothing in the village. Even the type of telephone we use.”
The countryside in the story is based on real places, and the forest outside Tokyo that inspired the film can still be visited today. The detail also rewards repeat visits, which the company sees regularly. “We’re doing our 600th show today, and the more time we spend in this world, the more we discover,” Victoria tells us. “You can tell how much everybody cares about the source material.”
How Victoria Chen plays four year old Mei
Victoria first saw the show from the audience at the Barbican, watching the original cast with a friend. She noticed she was one centimetre taller than the actress playing Mei, and left thinking she could not name anyone else who could take that part.
A year later she auditioned to be the understudy and didn’t get it. She cried, and then the production asked to see her again. This time she won the role itself. The casting meant more to her than a normal job offer. She had left a working career in Singapore to try London, against her family’s advice, at a difficult time for the industry:
“It was such a slog. The theatre industry post pandemic is rough for so many people. I gave up a lot of things back home in Singapore to come here, and my family just didn’t get it. So to get a leading role in an adaptation like this, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in the West End, it’s so affirming to see that there’s a place for people who look like us in this industry, and that taking a bet on yourself can pay off.”
Then there is the acting itself: how does an adult play a four year old for two and a half hours without it feeling forced?
“Four year olds don’t really know how things are supposed to be in the world. There’s no logic yet. They’re just receiving things, from the environment, from the people around them. Mei copies so much of what Satsuki does, what her parents do. So I choose to position her in a state of constant discovery. I’m a blank slate. I don’t know what line is coming next, because I’ve learned it and I’ve forgotten it. That’s the essence of what any four year old should be.”
Helen is quick to add what Victoria leaves out. Even knowing the show completely, she says, she could watch Victoria’s Mei and believe every moment of it. “Vic plays her with strength and resilience, but also this joy. Because Mei is the epitome of joy.”
How Helen Chong found Satsuki by remembering being ten
Helen came to the production from outside the Ghibli world entirely. Where she grew up, the films were not part of childhood the way they were for many of her castmates, and she watched My Neighbour Totoro properly for the first time around joining the show. She fell for the films immediately. They “say so much without saying anything at all”, she tells us, and have far more depth than the children’s film label suggests.
Her first instinct with Satsuki was to play a child. The rehearsal process talked her out of it:
“The more I worked with Phelim and the team, the more I realised I didn’t need to worry so much about playing a child, and to actually think deeper into her. Kids don’t believe they’re children. I remember me at ten, and I thought I was the biggest adult. I was a nerd. I still am. I had so many big thoughts about quite deep things. So I really believe Satsuki and I, we vibe.”
“Kids don’t believe they’re children. I remember me at ten, and I thought I was the biggest adult.”
Two hundred performances in, she is still finding new things in the character, and is glad she stopped trying to deliver a finished, polished Satsuki from night one. Victoria has seen that evolution up close: she has now played opposite six Satsukis, counting the original cast member, Helen and four covers, and says every one brought something different, which is part of why no two performances have ever felt the same to her.
What audiences say at the stage door
The audience for this show runs, by the cast’s estimate, from four years old to about ninety, and the stage door afterwards is where the two of them find out what stayed with people. Some talk about the music. Plenty talk about the chickens, which have a devoted following. Helen’s mum, in on her daughter’s opening night, chose to comment on a moment when the scenery moves to match the poetry of a scene, and has mentioned it every visit since.
One audience was so quiet during the show that the cast assumed they had not enjoyed it; at the stage door, the same people explained they had been crying the whole way through. The children are the most direct. Kids tell Victoria they loved her in the film, however often she explains that was someone else, and parents point at Mei and say, that is exactly our daughter.
One encounter from the week before our conversation has stayed with both of them. A big, broad man had been in the front row with his wife and daughter, and he was in tears:
“He said, you have no idea what you’ve done for me. I buried my mum two weeks ago, and I didn’t know how much I was holding in until I came and saw this show. But I’m leaving with a smile on my face, because this show is healing. You bring so much joy and hope and wonder back into people’s lives.”
That echoes something the company was told on day one of rehearsals, a line attributed to Joe Hisaishi himself: this show is about honouring the presence of the absence of loved ones. Grief sits quietly inside a lot of Miyazaki’s work, and readers who want to follow that thread further will find it running right through The Boy and the Heron as well.
“This show is about honouring the presence of the absence of loved ones.”
There is one more thing Helen wants people to know before the run ends. The company is entirely East Asian and Southeast Asian, which she believes no other current West End show can say, and the kids at the stage door see themselves in it without ever being told to. Boys tell the pair, “she’s the Satsuki and I’m the Mei, and we’re siblings.” It does not matter to them that the story is about two Japanese girls. They connect to it.
Seeing My Neighbour Totoro in London before January 2027
Here are the practical details. The show plays eight performances a week at the Gillian Lynne Theatre on Drury Lane, runs around two and a half hours including an interval, and carries an age guidance of six and over. When we mentioned a small baby in our household, the pair immediately pointed us to the relaxed performance on Sunday 8 November, where babies are welcome and stepping out and coming back in is expected.
Babes in arms are also welcome at the chilled performance on 13 September, and BSL, captioned and audio described dates run alongside. The full list is on the show’s assisted performances page.
- Show: My Neighbour Totoro
- Venue: Gillian Lynne Theatre, 166 Drury Lane, Covent Garden, London, WC2B 5PW
- Booking until: Sunday 3 January 2027, the final London performance
- Running time: Around 2 hours 30 minutes including an interval
- Age guidance: 6 and over, under 4s not admitted
- Tickets: From £25
- Relaxed performance: Sunday 8 November, babies welcome
- Chilled performance: 13 September, babes in arms welcome
Performance times, the map and everything else you need for the night are in our My Neighbour Totoro event listing.
As for who it is for, Helen has heard the objection many times and has a clear answer: “It’s very much for kids, but that doesn’t mean it is just for kids. Just come and see it, and you’ll see for yourself.”
We will leave the last word to Victoria, whose recommendation worked on us:
“People think they know what they’re getting into, even the fans, and they leave with something else entirely. I’ve never met a single fan who went and hated the stage adaptation. Not a single one. Give it a chance, because once it leaves, you don’t know when it’ll come back.”
All remaining dates are on the official booking page.
