SASAYAMA Prelims

Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage edited by Takashi Sasayama J. R. Mulryne Margaret Shewring The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge , United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk West th Street, New York,NY -, USA http://www.cup.org Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne , Australia © Cambridge University Press This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Plantin / [] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library hardback Contents List of illustrations page vii List of contributors x Preface xi Introduction . Part I Japanese Shakespeare in performance The rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan: from the s to the s One man’s Hamlet in Japan: the Bungei Kyokai production in the Imperial Theatre Koreya Senda and political Shakespeare . The perils and profits of interculturalism and the theatre art of Tadashi Suzuki . Hideki Noda’s Shakespeare: the languages of performance Japanese Shakespeare and English reviewers Directing King Lear in Japanese translation v vi Contents Part II Shakespeare and the traditional Japanese stage Preface to the Japanese translation of Renaissance Self- Fashioning Tragedy and emotion: Shakespeare and Chikamatsu Conflicting authorities: the canonization of Zeami and Shakespeare - Shakespearean drama and the Noh: theatrum mundi and nothingness Tradition and the Bunraku adaptation of The Tempest The performance of gendered identity in Shakespeare and Kabuki Kyogenising Shakespeare/Shakespeareanising Kyogen The Braggart Samurai: a Kyogen adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor Part III Afterword A playgoer’s journey from Shakespeare to Japanese classical theatre and back Part IV Chronological table of Shakespeare productions in Japan, - Notes Index Illustrations Colour plates Plate Scene from Barry Kyle’s production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (). Plate Toshifumi Suematsu’s production of Harue Tsutsumi’s Kanadehon Hamlet (). Katsuya Kobayashi as theatre manager Kan’ya Morita. Plate A poster for Senda’s Hamlet (), with Nakadai’s image superimposed. Plate The shipwreck scene from Yukio Ninagawa’s production of The Tempest. Plate Caliban (foreground centre) with Stephano and Trinculo watched by Ariel (above right) in Ninagawa’s production of The Tempest. Plate Caliban and Prospero in Ninagawa’s production of The Tempest. Plate Miranda and Prospero. Plate Ferdinand’s attempt to resist Prospero’s power in The Tempest. The photograph shows the use of the ‘spider’ device. Plate Banquo and Macbeth ‘on horseback’ behind the Butsudan screen which separated an inner stage area from the forestage in Ninagawa’s production of Macbeth. Plate Komaki Kurihara as Lady Macbeth in Ninagawa’s production of Macbeth. Plate Samisen player and narrator on the Bunraku stage, National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka. Plate Puppets and manipulators on the Bunraku stage, National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka. Plate Publicity photograph of puppets and manipulators for the Bunraku stage, National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka. Plate A scene from Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka. Plate Tamao Yoshida manipulating the puppet of Prospero and Minosuke Yoshida that of Miranda in the Bunraku adaptation of The Tempest. vii viii List of illustrations Plate Mansaku Nomura as Falstaff in the Tokyo Globe-Mansaku Company production of Yasyunari Takahashi’s The Braggart Samurai, a Kyogen adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor (Tokyo and on tour, ). Black-and-white illustrations . Takahide Tashiro as Henry VI and Yasunori Kawakami as the Duke of York in Norio Deguchi’s King Henry VI,Part III, Shakespeare Theatre, Tokyo (). . Masane Tsukayama as Macbeth and Komaki Kurihara as Lady Macbeth in Yukio Ninagawa’s Macbeth at the Lyttleton, the Royal National Theatre (). . Yukio Ninagawa’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a Zen-style rock garden in Kyoto (). Kayoko Shiraishi as Titania and Goro Daimon as Bottom. . Seisuke Yamasaki as King and Shozo Uesugi as Hamlet in Shozo Uesugi's Broken Hamlet (). . Sho Ryuzanji’s Ryuzanji Macbeth set in modern South-East Asia (). Masayuki Shionoya as Macbeth. . Hamlet (Tatsuya Nakadai) and Laertes (Tetsuo Hasegawa) in the final scene of Senda’s production of Hamlet, Nissei Theatre, Tokyo (). . Nakadai dying in Horatio’s arms, with Fortinbras in the background. . Tatsuya Nakadai in an overtly European Renaissance costume, in keeping with Senda’s Marxist insistence on the importance of early capitalism to the play. . Tadashi Suzuki’s bilingual production of The Tale of Lear with Japanese and American actors (). . Hideki Noda as Richard III in Hideki Noda’s Sandaime Richard, Yume no Yuminsha (). . King Lear, IV.vi.Noboru Nakaya as Lear and Masahiko Arima as Gloucester. . King Lear, V.iii.Noboru Nakaya as Lear, Jun Karasawa as Cordelia. and . Scenes from Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. . The Miranda puppet and its manipulator (Minosuke Yoshida) in the Bunraku adaptation of The Tempest. . The scene from Sugawara Denjyu showing the head of the puppet Kan Shojo, hero of the play, which was also used for the Prospero puppet in the Bunraku adaptation of The Tempest. The illustrations are reproduced by kind permission of the following: Colour plates Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; Asahi Shimbun Co. Ltd; – Yukio Ninagawa and the Point Tokyo Company Ltd; – The National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka; Mansaku Nomura and the Mansaku-no- kai. Black and white illustrations , , , , – and Akihiko Senda and the Asahi Shimbun Co. Ltd; John Haynes; Yukio Ninagawa and the Asahi Shimbun Co. Ltd; , and [Credit to come]; and Tetsuo Anzai and Theatre Group En; and The National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka; and Minoru Fujita and the National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka ix 1 Introduction J.R.Mulryne The origins of this book go back, for two of its editors, to the Edinburgh Festival of and a performance of Yukio Ninagawa’s The Tempest.At the end of the evening, the huge audience in the cavernous Playhouse Theatre sat for a few moments in silence, profoundly moved, before bursting into applause. Our own response paralleled that of other audience members, and the newspaper critics confirmed in the next few days that in their judgement too something of remarkable power had been staged. ‘The “rough magic” of Ninagawa’s Tempest’, wrote Michael Ratcliffe in The Observer ( August ), ‘is so sinister it scares you half to death, and so beautiful it brings tears to your eyes.’ Reservations were voiced, but the overwhelming balance of opinion placed Ninagawa’s interpretation among the most moving of the multitude of stagings of Shakespeare’s play. Years later, Jude Kelly, artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, asked by the Guardian newspaper ( November ) to recall the highlights of her theatre-going life, wrote of the production as ‘one of the most emotional evenings I can remember’. ‘Ninagawa’, she asserted, combined the theatricality and magic of the play with a fearsomely psychologi- cally-based central character . Prospero, a magnificent and frightening man, was wracked both with the moral burden of total power and the terror of relin- quishing it . Finally, he broke his staff across his knee and the sadness and relief was overwhelming. Prospero dealt with his own hubris through an act of astonish- ing moral courage – and so Ninagawa revealed the play. It was precisely this sense of Ninagawa ‘revealing the play’ that struck us as so remarkable and so open to question. We were aware of the success his productions of Medea and Macbeth had enjoyed at previous Festivals. No doubt expectation and advertising hype had played their part in the positive audience response on the evening we attended. No doubt, too, the sheer scale of the production, the crowded stage, the richly colourful costumes and settings, the mix of traditional and modern music, the precisely choreographed movement, and the exotic glamour of the Eastern references had appealed to the expectant sensibilities of an ethnically very J.R.Mulryne varied festival-going audience. Yet the sense remained of something more deeply ingrained and significant, something that went to the heart of con- temporary Shakespeare performance. What was the relationship of this exotic theatricality to Shakespeare? ‘Shakespeare’, we fully realised, is a construct responsive to political, social, economic and cultural influ- ences, and to theatrical preoccupations and resources. Did the accessibil- ity and the power of Ninagawa’s The Tempest mean that in the so-called global village a Japanese Shakespeare speaks our language? And if so, whose language is that? Problems of a verbal kind were obvious, super- ficially coped with in the Playhouse by electronic surtitles. Yet the language was heard or the translation read by so diverse an audience that understanding must have varied even more widely than in the case of a non-festival performance. And the production, while using a remarkably full and (so far as this is ever the case) literal translation, employed a language of theatre that transformed the script into an experience at once profoundly appealing and undeniably strange.

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