Net Café Refugee. Camden People’s Theatre.

Yuya Sato’s Net Café Refugee centres around three oddball misfits living a precarious life in adjacent cubicles in an internet café in Tokyo. As a superior Japanese version of the concept, the café features showers, futons, vending machines, a canteen, and a relaxed policy towards people living on the premises.

Stuttering rich kid Keita (Yuya Sato also writes) has absconded from his posh college for dim kids and now spends his days online playing Call of Duty, pondering suicide, and fantasising over the girl in the neighbouring booth, Noa (Mia Sumida, ethereal and other-worldly). She is a sex worker who uses a soundproof room at the venue to service her clients. Whatever money she makes goes on visits to an expensive “Men’s Concept Café”, where young women go to fawn over aspiring male models or actors. A third booth is occupied by Nobu (Nobuo Otsuka), a dropout salaryman with questionable hygiene who has lived at the venue for 6 months and gets by on a series of part-time jobs.

One might suppose tourists would give the place a wide berth, but by happenstance, aspiring British YouTuber Mr Tea (an ebullient Jack Bolton says “mate” a lot) is blogging about odd cafés around the world. He checks into the venue, camera in hand, and starts recording. A complication arises when a spy camera is discovered in the soundproof room. Accusations fly, and Mr Tea is ready to blog about them. Dark consequences threaten at least one of the characters.

Director Ami Nagano intercuts scenes with fantasy dance sequences. It is a device that effectively evokes the oddness (at least to those with UK cultural lenses) of the milieu and the alienation of the characters. One wonders whether these three Japanese misfits would really speak such idiomatic English, or indeed whether Mr Tea’s gauche attempt at interviewing would yield the suggested results. The culture clash promises drama, but the result is just a little too far-fetched.

Writer:  Yuya Sato

Director:  Ami Nagano