SHAKESPEARE DIARY

I am interested in the mysterious connections between action, gesture and the spoken word. The productions we remember are those in which actors appear to be acting autonomously within a coherent design. Do the actors appear to mean what they are saying? Do they hold our interest? Are they actually doing too much, or too little? It is hard work for everyone involved, and therefore all the more refreshing when an actor transcends even the values of the production to produce something special, as Greg Hicks did for me in a Royal Shakespeare Company touring production of Coriolanus I saw in 2003. Above all, there should be an underlying integrity that is sufficient to sustain the will of those who have paid good money and made the effort to come and see the show.

Yet playgoers too are independent agents whose interest in theatre intersects with their daily lives in all kinds of ways. The more we experience theatre, the more we want to understand what it is and what it does to us. One of my reasons for writing this diary is to develop a more informed approach to my own Shakespeare watching, but in the context of the Tokyo theatre, since most of the Shakespeare I see now is in Tokyo, where I have been living and working since 2003.

Shakespeare has been a regular feature of the Tokyo theatre for over a hundred years now, but in the 1980s a combination of economic prosperity and investment in new theatres and theatre companies together with a coming of age of the radical generation of actors and directors from the 1960s produced something of a Shakespeare ‘boom’, of which the opening of the Tokyo Globe in 1988 was the clearest example. Although the recession of the 1990s put a slight damper on activity, much of the Shakespeare we can see now is an inheritance of that boom: large-scale commercial productions at venues like Bunkamura Theatre Cocoon, established companies like Shakespeare Theatre performing at the Haiyuza in Roppongi, small experimental projects sometimes in collaboration with partners in other Asian countries.

Since the late 19th century, when the plays were first introduced to Japan, Shakespeare has served a purpose of stimulating the native theatre, even of unleashing its innate creativity. As in Britain, young Japanese actors want to try their hand at playing Hamlet or Ophelia, and Japanese Shakespeareans take pride in the modern translations by Odashima Yushi and Matsuoka Kazuko which enable those actors to do so. Shakespeare has also promoted interest in learning English and in British culture. Yet I believe the enduring reason for Shakespeare’s position within Japanese culture is simply Shakespeare’s humanism. In an age when all religions and ideologies have been tried and found wanting, Shakespeare continues to provide Japanese audiences with a gamut of characters and situations with which they can identify, and some of these characters and situations have become so familiar that they seem more Japanese than British Shakespearean. These are all good reasons for me to want to see Shakespeare in Japan.

The main barrier, of course, is the language, since Japanese translations tend to be wordier than the original and the actors tend to emphasize the sense of the phrase rather than articulate or pace individual words. Even some Japanese people find the actors speak too fast. The acting itself, however, is usually easy to understand and often superb, and the style of production often fresh and original.

In writing these reviews, I assume a reasonable knowledge of the original Shakespeare plays as well as basic knowledge of Japanese drama. My initial plan was to present about a year’s worth of reviews covering as many of the available styles and companies as possible and lasting up to the World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane in July 2006, but the reviews were resumed in 2008.

NINAGAWA TWELFTH NIGHT (30.7.05)

Ninagawa has often included references to traditional Japanese drama in his productions, but in July 2005 he went the whole hog by staging a complete kabuki adaptation of Twelfth Night with a cast of kabuki actors at the Kabukiza. The house was packed for the month. Kabuki actors have been playing Shakespeare since the Meiji Era but usually in the context of conventional stagings, in other words without their wigs and powdered faces. What was remarkable about this one was the professional thoroughness with which it was sustained. When the curtain went down on (or rather across) the final tableau, one felt that the revised domestic arrangements were appropriate not only to Illyria but to 400 years of kabuki tradition. Everything was in place. Much has been written on the relationship between Shakespeare and kabuki, but one wondered whether this production – beautiful though it was to perceive – had it rather too easy. There is an obvious correspondence, for example, between the onnagata tradition and Viola’s cross dressing. In Shakespeare’s play, Viola reaches a point where she realizes that this is a disguise that she no longer wants or can sustain, and yet there was no such doubting in this version. The most erotic moment came at the end of the second of the three parts when Princess Orifue (Olivia) cast her glance at Hisario (Viola) from atop a Chinese bridge; the moment had an eroticism which I had never noticed before in a production of Twelfth Night. The gulling of Malvolio, by contrast, seemed quite functional in its apparatus; one sensed that he was just an intruder upon a greater sphere rather than a Puritan with a rightful claim. At the end, Malvolio (Maruo Botao) tried a bit of Sir Topas conjuring in revenge on Sutesuke (‘Mr. Throwaway’, also known as Feste), played by Onoe Kikugoro, who headed this particular group of actors, and Sutesuke retreated terrified into the wings. In their Japanese context, these two were both tragic characters if only in the sense that they had yet to find their place. In this production, the kabuki came first, Shakespeare later, perhaps a long time later for some, but one hint as to its meaning was provided by a group of children who sang a Japanese version of the carol ‘O come, O come, Emmanuel’ by way of prelude. They did so before a cherry tree in full blossom, and no doubt this mixing of seasons was intended as a daring reference to the crossing of generational boundaries experienced by Olivia and Sebastian, Orsino and Viola. Yet it also suggested that these older folk too were waiting for salvation, and no doubt too many Ninagawa fans had been waiting a long time for this, a sensual fusion of East and West, and can hardly have been disappointed. Yet perhaps in doing so, Ninagawa was turning the idea of Shakespeare kabuki on its head by showing that once carried to its logical extreme it was still only theatre. It must have come as something of a personal triumph for the great director, fulfilling his postmodern dream to create ‘a ludic space’.

RYUTOPIA WINTER’S TALE (19.9.05)

Ryutopia is a new company founded in 2004 that aims to adapt the locality of the small venue to the global perspective of Shakespeare. Under their director Kurita Yoshihiro, they perform in Noh theatres in Tokyo and the provincial city of Niigata, and the actors receive training in Noh movement. Noh Shakespeare has a rather shorter history than kabuki Shakespeare, but can be highly satisfying, especially if the hana (or ‘flower’) of the performance is timed just right to harmonize with the climax of the Shakespearean play; this degree of coordination seems more important than in kabuki Shakespeare. Noh is also a more rural and localized tradition than kabuki, and in fact Ninagawa set his 1994 production of The Tempest among the Noh theatres of Sado, an island off the coast of mainland Niigata Prefecture. Ryutopia chose for their first two productions two plays, Macbeth and King Lear, whose universality is derived in part from their use of locality, and as the debates about globalization and Japan’s role in the world continue, we can expect more of this kind of production from Ryutopia and others. It is about harnessing the security of local networks to the realities of the wider world; the theatre is as good a place to start as it teaches both language and action. For their third production, the company chose another play with a strong sense of locality (well, I suppose they all do!), The Winter’s Tale. I have always appreciated this late romance with its motif of reconciliation amid the sheep shearing, although in fact the sparse Noh stage at Tessenkai in Omotesando left most of the agricultural shenanigans to the imagination. What we saw instead in that rather confined space was a remarkable contrast between the physicality of Leontes, played by a bonze-headed Tanida Ayumi, and the tenderness of Hermione (Yamaga Haruyo). Leontes has been called a suppressed homosexual, but in this production the problem was not psychological but that he was too big or ‘hot’ for the confined space, wherein lies a message no doubt for the global society. Above all, Leontes seemed oblivious to the dynamics that Hermione’s pregnancy imposed on the court: that his wife’s condition might drive her to seek emotional intimacy with a man other than her husband, although as Hermione and Polixenes played beneath a blanket one could sympathize that it was more than Leontes could bear. In the second half, Hermione was concealed within a brocaded tent of a kind familiar from Noh performances before appearing for the recognition scene in the mask of a beautiful woman. She was the only character to appear in a mask, and this moment seemed perfectly suited to the artistry of Shakespeare’s play. Leontes’ inner self had been transformed by his contact with the outer world, while after years of isolation Hermione’s inner grace had revealed itself not only in the creation of new life (as in the first half) but in a new face as well, one that was so genuine as to appear a work of art. I was also intrigued by the girls in white robes who lined one side of the stage in what seemed an imitation of the orchestra in Noh performance. They held globe-shaped lanterns, which they moved slowly up and down during the first half and then clasped at a fixed arm’s length during the second. This may have been referring to the different moods of the play’s two halves, but also powerfully suggested an underlying tenderness and the vulnerability of this globe we inhabit.

SHAKESPEARE THEATRE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY (5/10/12.10.05)

In October, the Shakespeare Theatre company celebrated their thirtieth year in the business with productions of the two plays with which they kicked off in 1975 and for which they are best known, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, also entertaining the audience with a collage of contemporary scenes based on motifs from the repertoire, Shakespeare Rehearsal. Under its founder Deguchi Norio, Shakespeare Theatre has acquired a reputation as a training ground for professional actors and more recently for bringing Shakespeare into high schools, but has never abandoned its mission of producing Shakespeare in a style and language that is accessible to all. Speaking for myself, I was pleased that they spoke Odashima’s translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a pace that I could actually understand (or at least some of it). In the early days, they favoured jeans and T-shirts whereas now the male actors wear suits, and the Elton John songs used for the debut production of Twelfth Night have been replaced by native Japanese pop music, but the spirit is still there. Nothing complicated, just straightforward acting, both ensemble and individual. One senses that the actors have been disciplined to know the plays inside out, and that the quality which they convey belongs to that magical transitional space between the amateur and professional. Shakespeare Theatre productions are for the young and young at heart. Of the three on offer this time, I preferred their Dream, which I saw performed by the company in Shizuoka in 2000 before a massive audience of high school students. There was an undercurrent of what can only be described as ‘pure joy’ as the couples achieved their goal of marriage. In Twelfth Night, however, I was struck by the theatrical excess of emotion with which Malvolio reacted to his humiliation. This kind of excess is a feature of several Shakespeare productions I have seen in Tokyo, although in the context of this one it suggested that Malvolio's problem is not exactly emotional repression but rather a matter of priorities: that, pace Ryutopia, he thinks ‘local’ and feels ‘global’ (‘some have greatness thrust upon them’ etc.). Shakespeare Rehearsal was built around a skit in which a weary film director directs the final fight scene between Macduff and Macbeth. Poor old Macduff just couldn’t get it right, reminding us that although Shakespeare's words might be arrows, actors too have lives to live (as well as mobile phones to be switched off).

2NK PROJECT SHREW (22.10.05)

Theatre X (from the Greek symbol chi) is a small local theatre in the old Ryogoku district of Tokyo, across the Sumida river from Asakusa and home to the National Sumo Stadium. Having seen a vibrant production there of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in the spring, I was intrigued to learn about an innovative dual production of The Taming of the Shrew (1594?) and John Fletcher’s riposte The Tamer Tamed (1611?), both directed and translated by Sato Rie, who has made a study of Shakespearean blank verse based at King's College, London, and Shakespeare’s Globe. The first of these seemed just right, although mainly thanks to a superb performance by Okamura Mibuki as Katharina. In the first half, she came across as a parody of herself but in the second achieved a dignity that was truly moving, both beautiful and wise, whatever one's views on her final defence of wifely obedience. One wonders whether this kind of woman is possible in contemporary Japanese society, or indeed popular among contemporary Japanese women. The foxy Bianca was small by comparison. Overall, though, the production seemed to be doing too much, the actors struggling to balance rapport with the audience with Sato’s concern for textual authenticity. For that reason, it will be interesting to see how 2NK Project develops. In 2003, they produced the first Japanese production of The Two Noble Kinsmen at the Yokohama Gaiety Theatre. Their approach is possibly too subtle at this stage in my Shakespeare watching. In The Tamer Tamed, the war of the sexes was shown in rather more candid terms, but feeling unwell, I left at the interval.

KU NA’UKA OTHELLO (1.11.05)

Ku Na’Uka are an avant garde company founded by Miyagi Satoshi in 1990 who present classical and contemporary dramas from both East and West in a distinctive style that draws on elements of traditional Japanese drama. They also perform in unusual locations, and for Othello had erected a makeshift Noh stage and gangplank (hashigakari) against the backdrop of the pond behind the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park, which was intermittently illuminated to great effect. The audience was thoughtfully provided with hand warmers and blankets to guard against the autumn chill. The distinctive feature of Ku Na’uka’s work, however, is the division of roles into narrator and actor which achieves a similar interiority to the Noh: Ku Na’Uka aim to achieve a postmodern effect that dramatizes individual suffering in the context of traditions in which the concept of individuality as we now understand it have had no place. This approach has an obvious relevance to a play like Othello where the central character is seen to succumb to his own individuality by imitating the manners and language of Renaissance man, although the pathos of this production emerged more in the production of Desdemona whose offstage utterance hazukashiya (‘it’s shameful’) rang totally hollow (and sincere). The chorus (or waki in Noh) became a vengeful psychological monster, sometimes joining the action individually or as a group and always varying the tone and pace of their words to suit the mood. Subtitles were projected on a screen, but turned off so as not to detract from the action, and at one point they were projected in traditional cursive script on a screen: writing on the wall! The actors wore not the refined masks of Noh but the grotesque masks of Balinese theatre, which supported the production’s acerbic tone. This was an urgent message, not at all beautiful or reassuring, but none the less effective for that.

AUN DREAM and MACBETH (10-11.12.05)

Born in 1959, Yoshida Kotaro is one of the outstanding Shakespeare actors of his generation, a prize winner and Ninagawa stalwart. In 1997, he formed his own company, AUN, specializing in Shakespeare production. The AUN style is a notch more professional and contemporary than Shakespeare Theatre (from which Yoshida graduated), and with a view to what their publicity describes as ‘deeper communication and deeper listening’. In a big city like Tokyo, where it is easy to cut oneself from what other people are saying, this seems to me a welcome goal. The name AUN comes from Buddhist terminology: a the exclamation and un the response. Japanese speakers often grunt un to show they are listening, but in more cosmological terms it is alpha and omega, the harmony of the heavens: a and n are the first and last symbols in the Japanese syllabary. In June, I had my first AUN experience, Measure for Measure at the Ikebukuro Sunshine Theatre. That production made perfect sense to me, the bureaucrat against the hedonists. With gangplanks running along the auditorium’s two sides, it seemed an interesting use of theatrical space: a theatre that divides against a more populist one that penetrates, which surely reveals a lot about theatre in Tokyo today. Yet what I remembered most about that one was Hoshi Kazutoshi’s Angelo, evoking just the right schizophrenic mix of private terrors and public authority and looking all the time like he was just about to lose his trousers.

For their winter showing, AUN went to Sasazuka Factory, a basement dive near Shinjuku that can hold no more than a hundred. This is the kind of intimate space in which Ninagawa got started in the 1960s, and has advantages in bringing home a clear message at relatively low cost. Many of the audience seemed to know each other, and most were under thirty. This time, it was Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Hoshi Kazutoshi playing Ross – a part I once played in a schoolboy production – and Egeus, and Yoshida a regal Duncan and Theseus. Yoshida ended up playing Bottom as well on the night I went, as the actual Bottom hurt his leg in his first scene. This hiccough did not seem to me to upset the overall balance of the production, and I did not ask for my money back, although (with script in hand) Bottom was obviously not Yoshida’s role, since Yoshida has such a presence that in this small venue it would be difficult to conceive of him than in any role other than Duncan or Theseus.

Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream both have a long history in Japan, and for similar reasons: Macbeth for the witches and the Dream for the fairies. I think this is partly because of the curiosity which a basically non-religious society like Japan has in the supernatural, and perhaps also because the plays hint at darker meanings within the society. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are certainly recognizable figures. AUN is a company that prefers pace and energy above articulation, but one of the advantages of its approach is that from time to time key words and phrases were articulated with emphatic vigour. One word that I had scrawled on my programme, and I can’t remember from where, is nozomi, meaning ‘hope’. In the Dream, ‘hope’ was personified in the very final scene when the three women, Hippolyta, Hermia and Helena, stayed behind as their men departed down the central aisle, and the fairies from behind presented them each with babies. This interpretation is suggested in the final speeches by Puck and Theseus. Hippolyta, not always a memorable character but played throughout with a memorable glint in her eye by Sawaumi Yoko, responded as if not just her prayers had been answered but also as if she at last knew why she was there. So, this was Hippolyta’s play, and not an interpretation I had seen before. The Macbeth entered more familiar territory – ‘I have given suck’ – as an image was shown of the lost boy both just before the opening scene and at the very end in an ‘if only we had had another go ...’ love scene between Hasegawa Ko as Macbeth and Negishi Tsukasa as Lady Macbeth. Hasegawa, with his neat black beard and cramped features, had too much of Richard III about him for my liking, but this was a production which made you think. I liked the way in which the witches appeared merely disordered and anomalous rather than plain evil. They wanted a leader (or a baby).

RSC DREAM (14.12.05)

I didn’t think I was going to see this one, as I had inadvertently got only enough tickets for six students but one of them dropped out at the last minute, and so I went. This was the ninth visit by the Royal Shakespeare Company since Trevor Nunn brought along Judi Dench as Hermione in a hippy version of The Winter’s Tale in 1970. Out of twelve different productions, the Dream has appeared three times, very much including the Peter Brook version in 1973, which had such an impact on the young Ninagawa among others. One suspects that what a Tokyo audience expects of an RSC Dream is something a little special and a little sexy. I had already seen this production at Stratford in the summer, when it struck me as self-indulgent, but this time it was just what one wanted to take the edge of the crisp December air. In fact, the first scene was played with unusual crispness, a Spanish Theseus (Miles Richardson) against an Indian Hippolyta (Bridgitta Roy) at ease in the sunlight of authority. As we entered the mechanicals’ scene, the dream started to take shape. What that dream ‘treats on’ depends on the interpretation but is usually some kind of reconciliation, and not by a deus ex machina as in the late plays but from within the language itself. We may therefore witness a reconciliation of high and low, male and female, poetry and drama, fantasy and reality, or – as in this production – of sun and moon. Yet what is interesting about the play is not so much the nature of the reconciliation but that its very difficulty stretches one’s resources to the point of incredulity, which is the point at which we enter the elongated and bifocal world of dreamland. Shakespeare’s Dream succeeds as it treats on the impossible, and a good Dream should swelter in an anarchic moment just before we wake up and realize that the impossible truly is impossible. This quality was achieved in the RSC production above all in the relationship between Joe Dixon as Oberon, sensuously enunciating every syllable, and Jonathan Slinger as Puck, who came across as a rather shambolic public school boy who can’t quite decide where he wants to go for his year off and is rendered unseasonably cynical by his indecision. The dark, mysterious underside of this relationship put the king’s quarrel with Titania into perspective; she was an ex-Goth handsomely played by Amanda Harris. It also contrasted with the comic obviousness of the mechanicals, led by Malcolm Storey as Bottom, whose Brummie accent to my overexposed ears recalled Jack Woolley of The Archers. a long-running BBC radio soap opera set in the Midlands. They too were a little ‘wooly’ on their social origins, but the feeling of discomfort and strain, even embarrassment in the performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, gave this group a vein of competitive energy that is sometimes overlooked in productions, but which in fact is central to the comic structure of the play. Like the lovers, the mechanicals were on the road to somewhere. This was a highly aural production, which at one level subverted the orality of Shakespeare by suggesting that just about any frequency is possible in the theatre, but then reinstated it within the framework of the play’s other correspondences: sun and moon, male and female, speaker and listener, and indeed listener and speaker.

GUCCIBOCCI DREAM (26.1.06)

Daringly subtitled ‘Sleep No More’, this one succeeded in keeping me awake for the two hours’ duration, perhaps because the production left me feeling slightly puzzled as to what the hell it was all about. The director Takahashi Masao provided a clue in the programme note, suggesting that as the Japanese population recorded its first ever decline in 2005 and social problems proliferate, the age of ‘the dreaming freeter’ (yume miru frita) is finished. Frites may be what they eat when they take their dates to cozy French restaurants in Shibuya, but the freeter is in fact a sociological phenomenon from the early 1990s when the bubble economy curtailed opportunities for lifetime employment with respectable companies, and many young people preferred to go it alone, creating their own futures out of a series of fast food franchises and shoe shops. It also has quite a lot to do no doubt with dating clubs and mobile phones: ‘the lost generation’. So Takahashi seemed to be suggesting that the optimism of Shakespeare’s play is irrelevant to a generation that can no longer afford to escape from social realities, and for all I know he is right. The subtitle, incidentally, may also be an echo of the famous 1955 declaration mo haya sengo wa nai (‘the war is over’) – marking an end to a liminal period of accumulation of cultural capital as serious economic growth takes over. And it may also imply that the freeters have at last got respectable jobs, bequeathing a vibrant culture that ‘new youth’ can only hope to imitate. All very interesting for the cultural theorists, and if it has any bearing on what I saw in Theatre Echo, Ebisu, freeter culture’s heartland, I would make three points. The first is that, if anything, it exaggerates a tendency of all theatre to be both opaque and resistant to interpretation. On the one hand, it was quite clear what was going on, but on the other I had the uncanny feeling of watching a group of friends interacting at a bus stop who were not altogether happy about being watched. This was a company that belonged to an alternative culture with an intricate network of codes and rituals that could probably be interpreted from the point of view of mainstream culture but not without some effort. The production’s official title, for example: ‘GUCCI&BOCCI + Group Tora Vol. 7’. Any offers? My second point is that there was something tentative about the production, as if the actors were enjoying themselves hugely but had not quite grasped what the play was about. They may have equally felt that their own insights were more interesting than the original play or the adaptation by Okuda Robun – that would be freeter culture. Finally, there was the surreal design, notably Kimura Jun as a gallant Oberon, that recalled a fusty school library and the characters in well-worn picture books on its wooden shelves. I wondered whether this production harked back to the individualism of ‘early years’ education of thirty or forty years ago and to the children’s books of that period.

RYUTOPIA MACBETH (8.2.06)

Some of the productions I see in Tokyo seem quite open to interpretation, whereas others are closed. This Ryutopia Macbeth falls into the latter category: in my case to the very end as Macbeth’s last moments were obscured from my view by a pillar on the Noh stage at Nakano’s beautiful Umekawa Gakuin theatre. Yet this was a production that fused Shakespeare with Noh technique in a style that was plausibly a negative image of both traditions. We heard very little of ‘the sound and fury’ one would expect of a Macbeth, but rather the resonances of his vaulting ambition were experienced in the reactions of those around him. The premise of this kind of fusion of pre-modern or early modern traditions is that the familiar should be made new, although the most conspicuous meanings of this fusion was not so much to do with Noh but with the central motif of sakaki branches, the sacred tree of Shinto religion. As with the lanterns in the Ryutopia Winter’s Tale I saw in September, these branches were the property of a group of shrine maidens, dressed in white for the first half and red for the second, and appropriated by Macbeth, Macduff and Malcolm in the final battle scene. In their hands, they became like pathetic toy swords, underscoring the pathos of the tragedy, and in the context of Shinto they may have been referring to that crime against nature to which the play itself refers. The struggle of good against evil becomes a battle between purity and impurity, one in which the protagonist is eventually undone by his sexual sterility as much as anything else. This battle of spirits was sustained through the deployment of three actors from the kabuki theatre, Ichikawa Ukon as Macbeth and Ichikawa Emiya as Lady Macbeth, with Ichikawa Kinosuke as Malcolm. The question then was not so much whether fusion is possible but who would finally conquer the stage, the answer lying not in Shakespeare’s play but in the truth that the murder of the patriarch is unthinkable in any Japanese tradition. In the famous English scene, Malcolm finds comfort from his isolation in a man who has been equally wronged, Macduff, and is thence persuaded to take an army north. In this version, and I am probably reading too much into it, the cue for revenge seemed to come from the witches as an embodiment of a feminized spirituality that has been thrown into disarray by Macbeth's crime. The witches adopted the role of a shite chorus, remaining on stage throughout and jerking heads and hands frantically in response to the tragedy that emanated from the Ichikawas’ controlled movements and Matsuoka Kazuko’s translation. If anyone was pulling the strings, it was Hecate, played by Fujima Murasaki, who is head of one of the most prestigious schools of classical dance. As in Shakespeare’s play, she appeared just the once, but if anyone had the power to overcome Macbeth’s demonic rhetoric it was her in the sense that physical movement of which dance is only a sublime representative cannot be encapsulated by language. This production was certainly one that tranquillized the soul, as great tragedy should.

HAGLET (11.3.06)

The set of this comic adaptation of Hamlet looked like a child’s toy castle, making the perfect playground for Kondo Yoshimasa’s offbeat showing as ‘Shibuya Man’. It is hard to convey the humour of this piece in as many words except that we all know the original to be a jolly funny play, but one may as well start with the title Hagelet, which when I first saw in Pia magazine might be something to do with ‘little piggies going to market’ but in fact was a pun on the Japanese word hage, meaning ‘bald’. As Kawai Shoichiro of Tokyo University observed in his erudite programme note, he knew that Hamlet was fat (having written a prize-winning book on the subject) but never knew he was bald. No doubt baldness has more than one meaning in most cultures, but must necessarily signify a state of transition, and I think the visual impact of this Hamlet had something to do with the prince’s ambiguity (old before his time), which the actor exploited to the full. Kondo himself still has a full head of hair, and I suppose his hair had been cosmetically receded in the style of the samurai, which would suit the traditional view of ‘Hamlet in Japan’ as a Renaissance samurai. This version, with a script by Suzuki Satoshi based on the Odashima translation and directed by Yamada Kazuya, laughed not only at Shakespeare’s play but also at the worthy pursuit of ‘Shakespeare in Japan’. Claudius and Gertrude were rather more interested in having sex than running Denmark, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hardly had to try, and the greatest fun the boy Hagelet got out of the play was in dying at the end. The Odashima translations are famous for their word play and sense of the Shakespearean line. Watching this show I had cause once again to ponder: what exactly does happen when you try to render Shakespeare’s blank verse in Japanese?

NINAGAWA ERRORS (12.3.06)

Having missed the Tokyo production, which sold out within a few days, I journeyed to Nagoya for the Ninagawa Errors, and it was worth the detour. Most, if not all of Ninagawa’s productions, have left me with a profound sense of the beauty of reality, which is perhaps another way of saying they make you feel good about yourself. Previous of his productions, such as the 1999 Lear, have worked on the verticality of the stage arena, with objects great and small falling from the ceiling to remind us who the protagonists really are, and although this production was dominated by a classical facade of statues and porticoes, the play itself deals more with horizontal relations which were brought into focus by a classically vanishing perspective glimpsed behind two central doors; this the work of designer Nakagoshi Tsukasa. It is a play about twins, and like all of Shakespeare’s comedies about identity and reconciliation; a note in the programme by one of Japan’s leading fortune tellers (uranai) told us more. Yet what struck me more than anything else about this production was how grown up they all looked, with Yoshida Kotaro the leader of the pack of as Egeon. It is extraordinary how big he looks on stage when he is not so big in reality; I would love to see him play Lear against an English Fool to reverse the 1999 Hawthorne-Sanada pairing. The rest of the pack were in fact male, with Uchida Shige, Tsukikawa Yuki and Tsurumi Shingo respectively as Adriana, Luciana and Emilia, and Oguri Shun and Takahashi Yo doubling as the Antipholus and Dromio twins. The two particular messages of this production were that it is okay (nay essential) for men to admit their feminine side and that making mistakes is okay too. All heartwarming stuff and carried out with great integrity, but in Japan admitting you’re wrong can amount to a dangerous loss of face. Even Ninagawa has made a few mistakes in his time, but among his actors is known for his dame dashi, which is when he shouts out ‘No good’ like the film director shouting ‘Cut’, except that Ninagawa used sometimes to get so angry that he would hurl ashtrays and bits of scenery at the actors.

SHOCHIKU DREAM (13.3.06)

It was hard to see the point of this production. The Nissay Theatre is one of the traditional homing grounds of Shakespeare in Japan, but one wondered whether a Tokyo audience really wanted to see another androgonous Puck leapfrogging suggestively around the stage or hear the erotic cooings of a 40s-something Titania. The biggest disappointment was the set, a mess of boughs and branches that owed more to the adventure playground than to real Shakespearean greenery. As in at least one other production I have seen here, this production drew a parallel between Shakespeare’s Ovidian mythology and an ancient world of the gods, but slightly spoilt the effect by playing around with Shakespeare’s text. I am not against adaptation but wondered what the point was of having Puck talk directly to the mechanicals, even if as Robin Goodfellow that might be quite feasible. Every good Japanese loves a fairy, and as was expounded at length in a lavish RSC-style programme, this is a play which overflows with the mysteries of the supernatural world. Yet this was a production almost completely lacking in mystery, except for the final scene when Puck looked out on to a sea of glittering nightlights, the world beyond. It strove toward a naturalistic effect, a coordination of green trees and earthy desires, which in a more coherently defined context of Japanese animism, could have been very compelling. Shochiku had assembled an outstanding cast of stars from stage and screen but rather than sending us back to the television shows from whence they had come, I thought that Shochiku could do better to don its other hat and using the same actors make a film out of it, one that like Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood works with the play to communicate something of universal appeal about Japanese culture. That would be something.

ZA MUCH ADO (18.3.06)

Shakespeare performance in Japanese is still to some extent dominated by the Odashima translations of thirty years ago. The Shakespeare of today’s Japan was formed both artistically and linguistically in the so-called Showa Genroku (1962-89), the period of high economic growth up to the death of the Showa Emperor which is named after a similar period of heady cultural development at the end of the 17th century; this is the era in which Odashima was translating the plays and when the Japanese made Shakespeare their own. Yet the idea of ‘Shakespeare in Japan’, and of course its language and its drama, go back somewhat further, above all to the translations by Tsubouchi Shoyo completed in 1927, and so it makes a refreshing change to witness for once a Shakespeare of a bygone era. Gekidan Za is an unusual new company formed in 2004 whose particular remit is to perform Shakespeare in the Shoyo translations with a cast of mainly amateur actors all over 50. Performances take place over two days and are keenly attended. Having seen their flag-raising production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year, I was not entirely convinced, feeling that while the Shoyo translation was dreamy enough, there was still something missing. This year, however, it was Much Ado – no doubt more suited through its mellowness to an older cast – and it was a true delight: rhythmical and funny, they had actually learned how to speak Shoyo’s quaint but elegant language. I realized that the reason why younger actors in the professional theatre would avoid Shoyo like the plague is not the language itself but because it interferes so horribly with what they’re used to; perhaps too these older actors are more at home with Shoyo’s exquisite honorifics. The company’s founder and director is Jo Haruhiko, by training a kyogen actor whom I once saw play Malvolio in a Ninagawa production of Twelfth Night. It looks like he ended up in the right place. Za, by the way, sounds like the word ‘the’ in Japanese pronunciation and means ‘theatre’.

*  *  *  *  *

STUDIO LIFE DREAM (17.4.08)

Arriving late, it wasn’t until I was able to procure a programme in the interval that I realized the true nature of this production. I should have guessed from all the women around me, but in fact Hayashi Yusuke’s deliciously husky Titania had me completely taken in, and it was strictly a boys’ Dream. Shinjuku’s Sun Mall theatre is just off the old 3-chome gay district, although this one struck me as more platonic than camp. To say that it had most of the clichés I would expect of a Tokyo Dream, above all the obsession with fairy magic, is not a criticism but rather recognition that they had driven their dream almost to perfection: the perfect set of baby clothes, the perfect birthday party. It was an artificial dream for an artificial city but also beautiful to look at and fun to listen to, as much of it was song, and at a pace which kept us in our seats for a full and pleasing three hours. I wondered whether this dream owed anything to the flower power of the director and lyricist’s Kurata Jun’s generation. She founded Studio Life as an all-male troupe in 1985 since when they have done thirty productions, including last year Denise Deegan’s girls school classic Daisy Pulls It Off (which I saw in London about twenty-five years ago). Such a great name for a company as well, suggesting of course the atelier existence of 20-something Tokyoites and jobbing actors but also – to my mind – the notion that we spend our lives (willingly or not) the agents and objects of artistic creation. How Shakespearean!

NOH LEAR (10.5.08)

If Hazlitt’s observation that ‘The Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime’ (1817) is one that has been proved wrong by most productions of the play I have seen on the Tokyo stage, then I think he was right at least about King Lear: ‘It is the best of all Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest.’ The play has a bearish, overwhelming quality that is hard to snap away from. It makes you want to talk but you feel imprisoned by your words, ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’ after all. This quality of earnestness might make it particularly suited to the Noh drama, the art of perfection above all theatrical others, and I have to say that I preferred Ueda Kuniyoshi’s Lear adaptation in the refined setting of the Cerulean Tower Noh theatre in Shibuya to his Hamlet adaptation that I saw performed on the concert stage of the Casals Hall in Suidobashi in 2005. The adaptation was divided according to the conventional tripartite structure of Noh drama, or jo-ha-kyu. A lengthy prelude (jo) covered Cordelia’s return from exile in France and reconciliation with her father at the end of Act 4. A soldier appears bringing orders for the couple's imprisonment, leading into the shorter, more complex ha section which included some of Lear’s greatest lines: ‘Ripeness is all’, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’. In fact, most of the lines (with the honourable exception of ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!’) were taken from the last two acts. Finally, the Fool appears to tell the story of King Lear, concluding with a song which is worth quoting in length as it so clearly expresses the point of this production:

It was this holistic interpretation, expressed through the Noh genre, that made this adaptation a transcultural one. Lear (played by Endo Hiroyoshi) really was Lear with a great white mane and old man’s okina mask, but fitting that he should play the second as the tsure (companion) to Adachi Reiko in the main shite role as Cordelia. Born in 1925, Adachi is the oldest female Noh performer in Japan, although you would not have guessed so with her face hidden behind her mask; she had remarkable poise. One line missing from Ueda’s adaptation was that early sign of Lear’s madness in Act 2, Scene 4, reeling at his daughters’ ingratitude:

Some critics have read these lines as signifying not only Lear’s misogyny but also suppression of the female nature within him; it is this failure to recognize his innate gentleness that leads to the tragedy. If that is so, then in this production at least Lear finds in Cordelia not only a daughter but a mother. For foreigners also, the sounds and appearance of the Noh adaptation may well offer something that they can’t receive from Shakespeare productions in their native language. This was a production that took me quite by surprise but then as Charles Lamb said (also quoted in Prof Ueda’s programme notes) ‘the play is beyond all art’.

AUN RICHARD III (25.5.08)

Theatre Echo in Ebisu feels inhabited. You ascend a winding staircase, present your ticket on a cramped balcony, enter left or right, and there you are. AUN made full use of this space for this, their fifteenth production. As I have noted in a previous review, their name refers to a and n, the alpha and omega of the Japanese syllabary, the echoing hearts of Buddhist cosmology. Kotaro’s Richard showed that it required only a little insight into the echoes of the human heart to become master of the universe. For the echo to work theatrically, it must be quick: no leisurely hollas across the hills of the Auvergne. And Kotaro was quick, having all in his clasp as he flailed around the stage. The murders seemed secondary; it was those little psychological humiliations that hurt, and this Richard knew how to get a point home. The production as a whole felt ‘inhabited’: the sense that this group of men, with their white suits and hirsute tans, had known each other a long time. The beginning was particularly effective. Blackout, then spotlight on Richard, sitting just there on a white leather sofa: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent ...’. Now it’s my turn, and I am ‘the snow’. What I suppose this production was about was a society in which everyone knows the rules of the game, and so the greatest crime is being taken in. As in so many of these Japanese Shakespeares, there were a number of touches which this theatregoer had never seen before. The Battle of Bosworth Field fought in white suits with non-touch aluminium baseball bats to the nasal twang of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ put me on the edge of my seat. In fact, Bob Dylan featured a good deal in this production, notably the song ‘I Shall Be Released’, which could have been meant for any of the characters, including Richard. When Richard did finally die, he crumpled beneath a huge white rose that had been suspended throughout on the rear facade of the Brookean white box. As the last monarch of the House of York was defeated, the Yorkist emblem, the white rose, shed gobbets of blood onto Richard’s body: a redemption of sorts. Also memorable was Takahashi Tsutomu as the Murderer, disposing of the English nobility with the casual amusement of a school P.E. teacher.

TNT HAMLET (29.5.08)

This was my second batch of TNT, having seen their Dream in 2007, and on both occasions it has rained. I recall Philip Larkin’s phrase from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘somewhere becoming rain’, as TNT (aka the International Theatre Company London) brought another successful Japanese tour to a close and the rainy season set in. I suppose that Shakespeare will set off emotional rain showers in all of us at some point in our lives, whether of the light or the heavy sort. I used to love the Dream but am not so sure now, hated Hamlet, now love it. And what of the 500 plus young Japanese women who queued under their umbrellas, as this was a special performance for the students of Tokyo Women’s Christian University? What did they make of Ophelia’s despair and suicide? What had this lovely girl done to deserve this? What had gone wrong? I shall never forget the loneliness in Sophie Franklin's Ophelia on that wide, empty stage? And the way that Laertes’ brusque dismissal of the Priest at Ophelia’s burial

recalls Hamlet's admonition,

This, after all, is what is so likeable about the play: that it reveals the limitations of human theologies and systems. In a foreign language, however, this can all be too much of a good thing, and so director Paul Stebbings had sensibly cut the text to 2 hours 40 minutes, including interval. The cast was just seven, which at times gave the performance a raffish, ‘Reduced Shakespeare’ feel to it, but I thought was well controlled to bring out the pathos of the second half. If I wanted to be facetious, I would suggest that Richard Keightley’s Hamlet was studying for his PhD, Richard Clodfelter’s Claudius and Natalia Campbell’s Gertrude had a touch of Basil and Sybil Fawltey, Richard Ede’s Horatio could bowl a mean leg break, J.C. Hoyt’s Polonius had something of the demeanour of the late and distinguished Japanophile Sir Peter Parker, Dan Wilder’s Laertes was Lawrentian, and Sophie Franklin’s Ophelia just unforgettable. Please come again!

KOREAN STUDENTS’ SHREW (2.7.08)

The regrettably little I have seen of Shakespeare in Korean has indicated a freer, more emotional approach than seems the norm in Japan. Ninagawa is emotive, but I have never seen a Japanese Gertrude sobbing uncontrollably over the body of her deceased husband – as happens in director Lee Yun-Taek’s Hamlet (2001) – the next moment shifting seamlessly into a marital dance routine with Claudius; it is always interesting to see how any culture deals with its grief. This adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew by the student drama club of Soon Chan Hyang University, near Seoul, which was being presented for one night only at Hosei University with a second performance at Doho University in Nagoya – it shed no tears, but it did present the vivid contrasts that I would expect of Shakespeare in Korean. As Lee Hyon-U, the professor who supervises the club and was accompanying the party, told me, there has been a boom in Shakespeare production in the twenty years since the Seoul Olympics; many of these productions have been iconoclastic in their treatment of traditional gender roles and fusion of traditional and contemporary performance styles. Moreover, student Shakespeare flourishes in Korean universities; this production recently won first prize in the Korean students’ drama contest. Director Kim Han-Baek had cut the play to just 45 minutes, and made the critical decision to perform Shakespeare’s lines in English. Sometimes these were difficult to hear, especially when gabbled. Kim told me they started rehearsing only in March, and so I felt that with a little more rehearsal the students’ English could really have come alive. Yet that weakness did not undermine the overall vitality of the production, nor its message of reconciliation between the patriarchal values of old Korea and individualism of the younger generation. Petruchio was stylishly played by Han Jae-Yeon as a chauvinistic yangban, one of the educated Confucianist elite who governed the Korean peninsula through the 500 years of the Chosun dynasty up to the end of the 19th century. One could fully believe how the self-righteousness of the yangban had lasted into the 21st century, leading to inevitable tensions with the Kates of contemporary Korean society – here played by Choi Su-Yeon as a hip-hop B-girl. It was fascinating to see how by doing her own thing and by letting her body speak for itself, this Kate was able quite profoundly to drive on the momentum of Shakespeare’s play, and to show that Kate will do what you want her to do eventually, but only if you are willing to spend a little effort by dancing to her beat as well.

TOKYO SHAKESPEARE QUEEN MARGARET (5.7.08)

In contrast to Hosei’s cavernous Sattah Hall, the Theatre Iwato – just across the valley from Hosei in the old Kagurazaka pleasure quarter – has room for an audience of no more than forty-five, and there we sat for a little over ninety minutes without interval watching this studio piece on one of Shakespeare’s great heroines and one of the most powerful women in medieval England, Margaret of Anjou, Margaret Beaufort, Queen Margaret of England, wife of Henry VI. This was an ambitious attempt in auteurship by Edo Kaoru, the founder and director of the Tokyo Shakespeare Company, to make a great Shakespearean character relevant to a contemporary Tokyo audience and to show how Shakespeare’s characters can indeed speak to each other in the confined space. Edo is one of a line of Japanese Shakespeareans, that includes such luminaries as Tsubouchi Shoyo and Kinoshita Junji, who have invested considerable time and effort to finding an appropriate register for speaking Shakespeare in Japanese. This quest is perhaps all the more pressing in such a visual culture as contemporary Japan, where one does sometimes want to escape from the assumption that every little gesture and choice of casual wear must ‘mean something’, whereas no doubt in contemporary London/Britain we have gone the other way, seeking to escape the plethora of the written word in happenings such as the Turner Prize (whose fruits, incidentally, have been on magnificent display this April through July at Roppongi’s Mori Art Museum). Edo, incidentally, has a rotundly classical name, being written with the same characters as the old name of Tokyo up to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and Kaoru is the name of one of the male protagonists of The Tale of Genji; the name sounds good as well. One of the myths of modern Japan is that the people of Edo did speak to each other so much more directly than is possible in the Japanese of today, with all its English influences. What we saw, then, in Edo’s brave adaptation was a French woman brought in as wife of the pious and well-meaning Henry VI, and horrified by the feuding she saw going on around her. Pace Ophelia, her cry of despair towards the end of the drama, the cry of a woman both feted and ignored, was unforgettable. Like the AUN Richard III, in which Kotaro’s Richard and his cronies at one point sat down in their Buddhist robes to talk about ‘Jesus Christ and his precious blood’, this was actually quite a Christian production, as it seemed that in Theatre Iwato no medieval baron could be taken seriously without first crossing himself before an audience with God’s anointed. To Margaret’s dismay, all this crossing only seemed to make them even more bad-tempered.

DAEHANGRO MACBETH (16.7.08)

Daehangro, or ‘University Street’, is one of the old student quarters of the Korean capital, and also home to numerous small and medium-sized theatres that for some years has made it Seoul’s West End (even if not exactly that), although many of the venues you have to search pretty hard to find through the restaurants and Starbucks outlets. Studio 76 is a 3rd-floor atelier whose intimacy seemed especially suited to both the violence and the supernatural elements of the Scottish play. Kim Nak-Hyung’s production was inevitably more rhythmical and more integrated than what one would expect to see in Tokyo, and also perhaps more sinister. The actors quite literally ‘played with fire’, as for much of the time the stage was lit by candlelight (‘Out, out, brief candle’) and the violence mediated with stools and chairs, notably the final scene when Macduff’s army – represented by no more than three of the tiny cast – advanced on Dunsinane bearing stools in place of the branches plucked from Birnam Wood. I hope it is not banal to suggest that the woodiness (rather than woodenness) of this production reminded us of the manifold uses of the element: as a tool of defence and protection, for making chairs that raise their occupants above ‘the dank and dirty ground’, and can indicate hierarchical status, giving rest and so on. It is this age-old harmony of man and nature that the protagonist unwittingly seeks to destroy.

RYUTOPIA WINTER’S TALE (11.9.08)

When I wrote about the original ‘Barcarolle’ version of this production on this page three years ago, I suggested that Tanida Ayumi’s great height in the role of Leontes in contrast with the smaller women and a smaller Polixenes exactly expressed the isolation that must accompany his sudden jealousy. That was in the narrow confines of the Tessenkai Noh Theatre (and I have to admit I still don’t know what ‘Barcarolle’ means). Now director Kurita Yoshihiro has dropped the ‘Barcarolle’, and expanded his production onto the big stage, with a tour to Eastern Europe and performances in Niigata, Tokyo and Kobe. I saw this last one, at the Hyogo Performing Arts Centre, which fittingly for a play about reconciliation took place on the seventh anniversary of 9/11. What struck me about Tanida this time was not so much his height as the strength of his acting. I have seldom seen such a remarkable transition from anger to grief as I saw in Hermione’s trial scene in Act Three, these emotions contrasting with the contained confusion of those around him. Like the Barcarolle, this was a production about holding onto the light, which is a light that the boy Mamillius (Yokoyama Michiko) could only imagine as he shaped an imaginary space before him. The motif of illuminated, football-sized lanterns was carried over from the Barcarolle version but on a larger scale. One difference from the modern Noh stage is that whereas the latter is lit, the darkness of the big stage allows for a greater play of light and shadow. At the beginning the white-faced acolytes came on to light the globes that encircled the main part of the stage, a magic circle within which most of the action took place. The eery sight of the flames floating across the back of the stage as they entered put me in mind of a famous waka poem from the famous 8th century Manyoshu anthology, one that is particularly associated with this part of Japan, and which can be said to define the intercultural nature of this production. Staring out at the Kobe coastline from the shores of Naniwa (present-day Osaka), the Prince Kadobe wrote:

We were witnessing a reflection of ourselves, and yet something different. The audiences in Eastern Europe must have been stunned by the visual beauty of this production, quite Ninagawan in places. This was certainly a more Shakespearean version than the Barcarolle, all the more so in my case as the subtitles carried the original text. It was interesting to see Shakespeare’s rhetoric quite literally defining each character and situation. The most explicitly Noh motif, which again was carried over from the Barcarolle, was Hermione’s recreation as the beautiful masked Noh woman caught in time, but this time rather than being concealed behind a brocade tent, she stood motionless upstage centre until ‘the time had come’ – a credit to Yamaga Haruyo’s powers of concentration. She became a kind of Marian fertility goddess, although the fact that it was quite easy to guess what was going to happen did not in any way lessen the pathos of the final scene. The grief and tenderness of Leontes’ reconciliation with his scene were almost unbearably moving in impact, giving point to what is surely the final point of this play, Hermione’s reunion with her daughter Perdita (fulsomely played by Machiya Misaki). Perhaps also in Hermione’s deliberate removal of her mask was an admission that she herself had been rather difficult to read (‘hard to get’) in the initial flirtation scene with Polixenes (Kawauchi Daiwa). We never hear of a Mrs. Polixenes; such are the perils of intercultural exchange. There was a lovely backdrop as well: a cascade of twinkling lights and what looked like a papier-mache mold for the contours of the winter landscape. Since red (not black) is the opposite of white in Japanese culture, the mold was stained with red light in the second half. Perhaps then the message of this production was environmental: namely that in order to read the landscape effectively one also has to be a part of it.

SHAKESPEARE COMPANY AS YOU LIKE IT (14.9.08)

Almost every Japanese production of Shakespeare I have ever seen has contained some reference or other to Japanese culture; it is inevitable. Yet few have gone so far as Shimodate Kasumi’s adaptation of As You Like It for the company he founded in 1993, The Shakespeare Company Japan, which I saw at the Rokko Kai Hall near Shinagawa. The adaptation was set in a hot spring resort in the mountains near Sendai in northern Japan, where Shimodate grew up and where he is now a professor of English at Tohoku Gakuin University. The adaptation was done in the Tohoku dialect of northern Japan, which as I discovered when I was researching my doctorate a few years ago, met Shimodate and sat in on one of his rehearsals, is remarkably different from the standardized Japanese of Tokyo in both its vocabulary and accentual patterns. For example, Tokyo Japanese tends to be quite heavily accented, usually on the second syllable of the phrase, whereas Tohoku speech sometimes has no accents at all, or else a slight rising pitch, which can give it a gently humorous feel, as if its speakers are wondering what all the fuss is about. This kind of contrast is ideal for a play like As You Like It with its dichotomy of court and country, but as the company’s name is meant to suggest, the locality of its work could be applied to any locality, including Tokyo with its shrine festivals and many villages. Whether or not such a free adaptation as this one is actually Shakespeare is harder to say, but in my view it was Shakespeare, because the comedy was essentially festive and the hidden sadness one expects of Shakespearean comedy was suggested in a famous haiku by Basho that the Touchstone character quoted when he arrived at the little onsen (i.e. hot spring resort) station:

Cicadas live for only seven days, and so, like cherry blossoms, symbolize the transience of human life in Japanese poetry. The transformation of Rosalind from man to woman at the end of the play was also true to the Bard, whose portrait was sitting at the back of the auditorium. It is the marriage scene, the last scene of the play, and everyone has come together for the onsen festival. A pair of Chinese conjurors are brought on. After some tricks with plastic flowers and a wand, they invite Rosalind (Hoshi Nami) in her men’s yukata to be the lady what gets sawn in half. Hey presto, the veil is lifted, and there is Rosalind, bright eyed and apologetic in a summer frock. This brief moment of truth that she doesn’t have to pretend any more is one of the most moving moments of the play. Orlando (Hasegawa Kei) was played as a bushy-tailed salaryman, Touchstone (Shioya Go) as a sales rep, Audrey (Murata Taiko) as the bottled drinks lady, Jacques (Ryogoku Koichi) as a mellow ex-singer by the name of Frank Kobayashi, and there were plenty of warm-hearted geisha. A mock serious policeman meant to be William, I think (Kato Tsubasa), kept order with his whistle. A production brimming with good humour.

NINAGAWA MUCH ADO (8.10.08)

So, back to Ninagawa. I wasn’t at all sure what to expect of this one, as the publicity material promised an all-male cast, and I had never imagined the willowy Hero or brash (but definitely not butch) Beatrice being played by men. In fact, this was the fifth of the comedies that Ninagawa has directed in this way, if we include the kabuki Twelfth Night: partly a nod to Elizabethan theatre, but also (as the programme note explained) a means to develop the skills of young actors, since none of the young men on show were kabuki onnagata, and it suited Ninagawa’s brand of theatricality well. In Matsuoka’s contemporary translation, Takahashi Issei’s Beatrice spoke like a man in order to assert himself in a society where men took all the credit. Tsukikawa Yuki’s declaration of Hero’s innocence in the reconciliation scene, ‘As surely as I live, I am a maid’ (5.4.64), sounded quite Biblical in translation - otoko wo shirimasen, ‘I know not men’ – provoking a smacker from Hasegawa Hiroki’s Claudio, perhaps the most erotic moment in the production. Truth and integrity were what mattered, whatever one’s position on the gender spectrum.

One is always moved by Ninagawa’s productions, but one concern that I have sometimes had is whether the grand climactic effects are created by narrative devices (in particular, music) or whether they are coming from within the original text. I should admit that this play is not one I know well, but I was surprised at the sparsity of metatextual treatment, especially for the highly dramatic wedding scene, when Claudio accuses Hero of infidelity. Just a few bars of the usual Ninagawa score were allowed as Hero sank into the arms of her confidantes amid a sea of white chiffon. Just for a moment Hero was no longer a classical hero but a Romantic heroine as Claudio asserted his manly rights, and this was all that we needed to see that Hero did not have to prove her frailty by giving herself to another man.

This was not a classically consistent production but one in which one could sense Ninagawa playing all the time with the audience’s perspective in order to ask, and answer, the difficult questions about love and human identity. The backdrop, for example, looked like the facade of an 18th century Italian town house, but could equally have been a hospital or convent. Likewise, the centre of the stage was dominated by a huge rostrum on which were mounted not three or four but thirty/forty classical statues. In the light, they looked like what I guessed they were: papier mache models, some of them no doubt of Ninagawa’s staff, and none of them quite right. In the half light, their appearance changed altogether, and they were surprisingly realistic. Perhaps this said something of the transformative power of love. Rather like the Easter Island monoliths in Noda Higeki’s 1985 Twelfth Night, these statues also served as oppressive role models for the chivalric code that underpins the Sicilian society of the play, the code that Claudio transgresses by trying to enforce it so rigidly. This was also the code that Dogberry (Senoo Masafumi) and the other comic characters unwittingly mock by their inadequate grasp of its language and conventions. It is only when the young knights communicate with Dogberry that the mess of Hero’s betrayal can be sorted out. At the end of the play, the social hierarchy is restored, and the two couples – Hero & Claudio and Beatrice & Benedick – take their place on the rostrum, not entirely happily.

Benedick was played ‘young’ by Koide Keisuke, a young man old before his time and a good generation younger than Kotaro’s Don Pedro. The veteran Kotaro kept the production together, especially in the first half, both looking and sounding like an Italian man. Recently he has been playing mainly tragic roles, and I felt a borrowed tragic awareness gave Kotaro’s acting a certain edge, a vague sense that knives could be drawn at any moment, which was harder for the less experienced actors to convey.

MAIDENAGOYA ROMEO AND JULIET (6.12.08)

This was a brave, and in many ways successful attempt to present an intercultural version of what is arguably Shakespeare’s most intercultural play. Set in the Meiji era with a mixed cast of Japanese and foreign actors, the production explored tensions between Japanese and Western values that are still relevant. Montague (Joe Sichi) was played as a Yankee general brought in to train Japanese soldiers in modern warfare, Capulet (Suzuki Yusuke) a member of the old nobility who resents the casting aside of traditional values. As ahistorical no doubt as The Last Samurai but totally credible to anyone who has spent time in this country that has always provoked strong reactions, and where foreigners may be forgiven for wondering why their efforts to carry out the duties for which they have been employed are sometimes undermined by the culture itself.

Stephen Pottinger’s half-Japanese Mercutio presented the most tragic figure in this scenario, in fact one of the more tragic Mercutios that I have seen, a samurai who would not hurt a flea. Under Michael Walker’s direction, the production had an epic touch that relied considerably on programmatic music, and was sometimes too much for a small basement venue like Roppongi’s Atelier Fontaine. On the other hand, part of the charm of Romeo and Juliet is that it is an embarrassing play, and the moments of excess were never allowed to curdle. Eden Plaisted’s Romeo, for example, could never stop moving, and had a way of moving that could only remind one of the dance floor. As the programme explained, having lost his mother in childbirth, ‘he has refused to give up on his longing for the perfect love that will save him.’ That was both believable and unsentimental! Irene Dewald’s Juliet also knew where she was going, and her appearance as a foreign actress in the most stunning of kimonos challenged one to believe that Romeo was not falling in love with her as an exotic young Japanese woman but for qualities that eluded her race.

That sense of the beyond may have been provided by Michael Kruse’s Friar Laurence, one of the numerous missionary priests who flooded into Japan during the Meiji era. Certainly one of the highlights of the production, which concluded the first half, was the Friar’s marriage of the couple, conducted entirely in church Latin: an indulgence, but an eminently forgivable one. Yet the most outstanding feature of the production was the bilingual script, which swung effortlessly between the original and Odashima’s translation. This learning to speak the lines in the other language and to speak them convincingly on stage must have been the greatest challenge for the company, something I have never seen in a Japanese production. Occasionally they stuttered and gabbled; Irene Dewald must win the proficiency prize, while Mari Miyamoto’s Nurse was the most realistic. Overall, however, the impression given was of a quest for what Walter Benjamin called ‘a pure language’, a language that transcends cultural and linguistic barriers.

NINAGAWA WINTER’S TALE (20.1.09)

After the Ryutopia Winter’s Tale last summer, I was expecting something a little special from Ninagawa at the Sai no Kuni Saitama Arts Theatre, but regret to report that this was more of a study in Shakespeare's great romance than a production of the grandeur of his 2003 Pericles, which went most of the way toward showing British directors how the thing should be done.

Pericles has interested Japanese scholars all the way back to Tsubouchi Shoyo on account of its uneven structure which, with the device of the narrator Gower, bears some resemblance to kabuki. In other words, there is in the traditional drama a strong sense of the unevenness of destiny on which Ninagawa capitalized to show how the opposing classical virtues of proportion and restraint might bring the strands together again, and the reunion of Pericles with Marina and Thaisa was indeed unforgettable. Yet despite the oohs and aahs of a chorus of lackeys, including one in uncontrollable sobs of joy, the reconciliation of Leontes with Perdita and Marina at the climax of this Winter’s Tale left one cold: a feeling that the play’s fundamental message was to do with jealousy rather than the restorative powers of the natural cycle, or even love. At the end Toshiaki Karasawa’s Leontes looked even lonelier than he had at the end of Act Three, shrouded in a vermillion robe that visually shrunk his head from its actual size. (One imagined he had spent the previous seventeen years with the royal ‘shrink’, and was still blaming himself.)

Perhaps the problem is that, unlike Pericles, the play’s unevenness lies in its plot rather than structure, especially Leontes’ dramatic descent into jealousy in the first act and the mystical forces that lead Florizel to Perdita in the sheep shearing scene in Act Four. In terms of structure, The Winter’s Tale is quite a balanced play, and it is because it is balanced that there is no need to explain the mysterious forces that at first destroy and then restore. On the one hand, this production seemed too much influenced by Ninagawa’s experience directing Greek tragedy and, more recently, Shakespeare’s Roman plays in its suggestion, quite simply, that the Sicilian monarch has ‘caught too much of the sun’. The action of the Sicilian scenes was framed within a huge box of which the rear facade was dominated by a Pompeiian portrait of Apollo rising, and there beneath the sun god was the son and heir, Mamillius, frolicking. Somehow in January, in suburban Saitama, the effect didn’t quite get through, even if it did show the king in his torment. Likewise, the appearance of Time at the beginning of Act Four as a figure in white casting off a series of masks before transforming himself into a baby emerging to new life seemed contrived, especially as the actor happened – like most babies – to be bald. By contrast, there was only scant attempt to reproduce the famous stage direction ‘Exit pursued by a bear’, surely a moment at which Ninagawa might have excelled, and it was remarkable too that Hermione’s deathly faint happened off stage.

Overall, the production seemed too clean and honest. Even the roasted pig that was the centre piece of the sheep shearers’ feast looked too shiny to be true, while Yuko Tanaka’s Hermione was knowing rather than vulnerable. If anyone, it was Tetsuro Sagawa’s Autolycus who stole the show with a line in knick-knacks and Satanic leers that suggested the true underworld of this play, the world of barter and living by your wits, a world in which Leontes would not survive a day. One of the memorable images of the production was of a country lass trying on one of Autolycus’ purloined scarves. Her obvious pleasure in this moment of extravagance seemed about as real as all the other rewards which the play enacts.

TOKYO SHAKESPEARE FALSTAFF (22.2.09)

Tokyo audiences are a respectful bunch. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had to shout to make themselves heard against the din, and Shakespeare wrote lines that penetrated the din, since as we know Shakespeare’s audiences went as much to hear the drama as to see it. Yet sitting through this latest offering from the Tokyo Shakespeare company, I felt I could have been at a piano recital, such was the lack of audience response and indeed any kind of static between the lines. It was all internal. As at a concert, we did not applaud between movements, since this adaptation by Kaoru Edo comprised four scenes from the Falstaff plays interspersed with backstage chat from the actors, one of whom admitted candidly that ‘Shakespeare is great but I prefer Dickens.’

Japanese Shakespeareans have long been fascinated by this writer who suggests so much and yet doesn’t seem to have a point of view. If I had time to praise Edo’s elaborate script I would hope to comment further on the subtleties of the production, but if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, this one tasted very nice. As with the company’s previous efforts, Keiichi Sato accompanied the entire show on his lute: very different from the piercing shamisen of kabuki drama, but humorous, gentle even. Some Japanese have called Shakespeare yasashii Sheikusupia, ‘gentle Shakespeare’, big enough to tolerate all comers, which must be psychologically important in a culture that can be rule-bound and exclusive. The four vignettes led to a kind of identity crisis for the Hal character, as he wondered aloud whether he was Henry or Hamlet, and indeed the paunchless Falstaff character did have something of Claudius about him.

FESTIVAL/TOKYO OTHELLO (1.3.09)

This was one of those stunning intercultural productions that appear in Tokyo from time to time, in this case part of F/T 09, a series of theatrical events organized this spring to promote a new cultural image for the city. The production was based on the Ku’Nauka Othello, devised and directed by Satoshi Miyagi, which I saw (and reviewed) in November 2005, and although I was impressed struggled to keep a hold on the liberties it took with the text.

Noh adaptations of Shakespeare tend to focus on key moments that are explored for their dramatic potential through the conventions of the genre. An adaptation like Miyagi’s goes even further in seeking to project Shakespeare’s textuality upon the textuality of the actors’ bodies and complete theatrical effect. In other words, we see something that is recognizably Japanese, in which Shakespeare’s story is reduced to its most archetypal features, and which consciously seeks new modes of expressing its liminality. This new take by Korean director (and former Korean Minister of Culture) Lee Youn-Taek comprised four scenes leading up to the murder of Desdemona, with Othello’s terrible soliloquy as he enters his wife’s bedchamber, ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!’ (5.2.1)

The novelist Natsume Soseki, who studied Shakespeare in London at the turn of the 20th century, wrote this haiku giving his response to the play, and this was declaimed at the start of the performance:

Soseki suggests that the cause of Othello’s jealousy is not so much her alleged adultery but the colour of her skin, which like the chrysanthemum continues to bloom throughout the year and represents an innocence that Othello desires for himself. In the final scene, Desdemona held a white chrysanthemum to her breast, which Othello, in samurai armour complete with horned helmet, finally grabbed from her; this was the stylistic representation of the murder. Yet the production also wondered aloud what Desdemona felt about living in a foreign port, as she too suffered a crisis of identity just prior to her killing. It was clear that the couple’s move to Cyprus had fundamentally altered the nature of their relationship. It seemed to me the production dwelt more on the ambiguity of this relationship, the capacity for pause and wavering, than anything else. A red-haired Iago appeared briefly, in a comic interlude (ai kyogen) in which he accompanied Othello to the bath. Othello was played as a gangster boss, with a great tattoo on his back.

What made the production so much more enjoyable than the earlier version was the interplay of Japanese text and traditional Korean music and dance, in particular the shamanistic dance called chohongut. (Shamanism is still commonly practiced in Korean society.) This cultural interplay – for example the distinctly Korean inflections of the main chorus figure – was framed against the play’s dichotomy of black and white to create a pure cathartic effect that was enhanced by the music. In the finale, the stage erupted into a joyous dance as at last all negative energies had been released.

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KAMIGATA ERRORS (20.10.13)

The metaphor of ‘time stealing’ is central to the comedy of The Comedy of Errors: as a motif of the accidents of time that separate and finally reunite a family and also in the case of Dromio of Syracuse’s exclamation to Adriana (wife of Antipholus of Ephesus), a pithy joke. This still current metaphor is used only once in the play, but is its most overt use in the whole of Shakespeare:

Dromio makes a joke of the tragic effects of time expounded in romances such as Pericles (which also visits Ephesus) and in The Sonnets, but if the power of time to heal and redeem in the later comedies is also challenged by the improbability of Shakespeare’s ‘mouldy tales’, then The Comedy of Errors suggests the opposite: that the evasion of time through farce and drollery serves to confirm its reality. The comic mishaps that occur as the two sets of twins mistake one for the other lend the tragedy of past events their missing perspective; they frame and finally purge the tragedy latent in Shakespeare’s comic vision. What we see is a group of frightened individuals rushing around the stage in their efforts to stave off the scheduled execution of father Egeon (and likely punishment of the two Dromio servants for ‘screwing up’) only to find that the inevitable turns out somewhat better than expected; the irony is that this inevitable outcome has been set in motion long ago with the births of the Antipholus and Dromio twins. Blood will out, and time may yet repay his debts and return the stolen goods after all.

Kishi Tetsuo’s adaptation for Piccolo Theatre had just such a stealthy, stealing quality that seemed to run true to the original, and indeed, with no disrespect, had ‘stolen’ a good ninety minutes of the original to conform to the episodic structure of midori kyogen, the practice initiated in Osaka in the 18th century of staging a series of set pieces rather than a whole kabuki play. This was not so much a production telling a story but rather, in the Kamigata style (the culture that developed in the Kansai region of western Japan in the early modern era as distinct from Tokyo, or Edo, in the east), one that presented a series of vignettes that made the unhurried atmosphere of the neighbourhood Piccolo Theatre in suburban Osaka seem the ideal place in which to see it. Like Yasunari Takahashi’s kyogen adaptation of the same play in 2001 (The Kyogen of Errors), Kishi had adopted the device of localized adaptation as a trope for the clandestine elements of the original, for The Comedy of Errors is a play in which outsiders adapt themselves to the local (and vice-versa), and even if Kishi’s Ephesus was not necessarily Osaka it was a bustling port imbued with the unmistakable qualities of Kamigata culture: brash, mercantile, and good-humoured.

Yet whereas Takahashi’s Errors depended on stock devices such as the kyogen tarokaja for the Dromio zanies and the use of masks, Kishi’s adaptation seemed rooted more in a specific culture with its bushi (samurai), shonin (merchants) and coquettish nyobo (housewives), not to forget the mellow autumnal backdrop of a harbour in the style of an ukiyoe painting. Takahashi’s Errors famously began with a cast of red-faced demons haranguing the audience with Yayakoshiya (‘How confusing!’); Kishi was having none of that, although in the opening dialogue between lord Otomo Takatoki (Solinus) and merchant Goemon (Egeon), the latter did say yo no naka ni wa fushigina koto mo areba aru mono (‘this is a funny old world!’). The apparent reference to the Goemon noodle chain stood us in good stead as when Hachimansai (Pinch, another ‘scene stealer’) came to exorcise Akihama no Heiemon (Antipholus of Ephesus), she did so with a list of Chinese dishes (‘Wontanmen, chashumen, fuyohai’ etc.) that contrasted nicely with the samurai names of the main characters and recalled the camp humour of Yoshimoto owarai (a contemporary outlet of Kamigata culture). At more than one point the humour teetered on the absurd, as when Ōhama no Heiemon (Antipholus of Syracuse) declared to his Kambei (Dromio): Tonari no musume wa kiryo yoshi, okiku nattara effu kappu (‘The girl next door’s so cute. She’ll be an F cup when she grows up.’).

This unique moment of linguistic transgression (which relates to nothing in the play except as a general representation of the sexual banter) seemed also to express the limits of adaptation, the point at which the adaptor can go no further and the joke is on Shakespeare. That was Kishi’s invention, but where the texts did coincide it was interesting to see how Shakespeare’s early style transformed itself into the Kamigata patter. For example, Goemon’s wife Onatsu (Emilia) gave us the following series of consequences:

This is the abbess’ explanation for why Adriana’s husband, Antipholus of Ephesus, appears to have lost his mind, and could have come straight off the stage of the Namba Grand Kagetsu (the popular stand-up comedy theatre founded in downtown Osaka in 1987). Here is what Shakespeare actually wrote:

The ‘F cup joke’ was a rare moment in a production that was remarkable for its restraint, one based not on outrage at the cruelty of fortune but on the path of humility. In a programme note, Kishi expressed his dislike for sound bite politicians who ignore the consequences of their big words, preferring the caution of the true peacemakers, and this attitude is reflected in Antipholus of Syracuse’s admission that

Director Takahiro Son compared this infinite space to the darkness of the auditorium when the lights go down, and so to the director’s infinite range of possibilities; in Shakespeare’s play it is a space out of which the apparently impossible takes shape. This production clung, therefore, to a belief that for all the stealth and ease with which the events on stage unfolded, the final outcome is little short of miraculous. In the post-show talk, Kishi mentioned his use of the traditional shichigocho (seven-five syllabic meter) in his adaptation, but for me it was the texture of the vocabulary and inflexions that conveyed the sense of awe. Kishi’s adaptation had conflated four time frames – Shakespeare, the ancient world, the Kamigata, and the theatre itself – and in the company’s lightness of touch this dual contrast of ancient (Ephesus and Kamigata) and modern values (Shakespeare and Piccolo) nicely emphasized the play’s own comedy of mistaken identities. In this perspective, the time could indeed seem miraculously ‘to steal away’.