THE TWO JAPANESE PRODUCTIONS OF MACBETH: AKIRA KUROSAWA'S THRONE OF BLOOD AND YUKIO NEVAGAWA'S NINAGA WA'S MACBETH by KISHIKO MASUO A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Birmingham for the degree of MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Faculty of Arts The Shakespeare Institute The University of Birmingham March 1997 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. TABLE OF CONTENTS Synopsis Introduction ........................................................... 1 Chapter I Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood ................................ 10 Chapter II Yukio Ninagawa'sMac6ef/i..................................... 41 Chapter III The Comparison between the Japanese productions and the Western ...... 71 [ 1 ] Kurosawa v. Welles and Polanski.......................... 72 ( 1 ) The Witches' scenes .............................. 73 a ) Mono-no-ke in Throne of Blood ................. .73 b ) Orson Welles' Witches ........................ 75 c ) Polanski's Witches ........................... .78 ( 2 ) The thematic consistency in openings and conclusions ..... 81 a ) The circular structure in Kurosawa's opening and ending .....................................82 b ) The circulation of evil in Polanski's opening and ending .................................... .84 c ) Welles's opening and ending .................... 86 (3 ) The interpretation of the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth ...................................88 a ) Kurosawa's orthodox interpretation of Macbeth and his lady.................................... 88 b ) Polanski's beautiful couple of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth................................... 91 c) Orson Welles's Macbeth and his lady ............. 93 [ 2 ] Ninagawa v. Trevor Nunn ............................... 95 ( 1 ) Differences ..................................... 96 a ) The difference of language ..................... 96 b ) The cultural difference of East and West........... 97 c ) The difference of colours ...................... .98 d ) The simplicity of Nurrn'sMacbeth and the spectacular- ization of Ninagawa's ........................ .99 e ) The acting of lan Mckellen and Mikijiro Hira ....... 101 ( 2 ) Similarities ..................................... 103 a) The idea of bystanders in the productions .......... 103 b ) The non-pessimistic ending of the productions ..... .104 c ) The religious aspect of the productions ........... 106 d ) The acting of Judi Dench and Komaki Kurihara ..... 108 e ) The stream of the plot vitalized by the productions... 109 Conclusion .......................................................... 112 Notes .............................................................. 115 Bibliography ......................................................... 126 SYNOPSIS Among productions of Shakespeare's plays in recent years, some cultural adaptations by Asian and other foreign directors are more highly regarded than English productions which use the original texts. Two such productions are Throne of Blood, a film directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1957, and Ninagowa 's Macbeth, a stage production by Yukio Ninagawa in 1980, ( first staged in Tokyo, in Edinburgh in 1985, and in London 1987). The significance of these foreign productions is how they revive the power of Shakespeare's originals energetically in their different cultural, social, religious and linguistic context. These two Japanese productions of Macbeth show the examples of those productions which succeeded in transforming and reviving the power of the play into their own tradition. To understand the Japanese re-interpretation of the play, the viewer or the audience must learn about the cultural background, which describes Shakespeare's play from the Eastern point of view. Western representatives of productions of the play are, on film, Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, and on stage, Trevor Nunn. Through consideration of these western productions, the originality and uniqueness of the Japanese adaptations of the play can be seen. The intensity and suspense of the drama are most impressively expressed in their own Japanese cultural context. It can be said that the encounter of the East and the West brings another aspect to the interpretation of Shakespeare's drama as performance. ( 36,644 words) INTRODUCTION Throne of Blood ( Kumonosu-jo, 1957 ) by Akira Kurosawa is one of the most successful Shakespearean films, although it is a complete adaptation ofMacbeth and does not use the language of the original text at all. Some critics do not regard this adaptation as comparable with other Shakespearean films in his own language, and they try to categorize the film as a Japanese samurai version of the play. They frequently misunderstand the Japanese cultural background of the film, for they try too hard to authenticate the original play. There must be a way to understand the film more properly, if the viewer knows its cultural background in more detail. The viewer will know how the director Kurosawa understands and revitalizes the essence of the play far better than most of the other film makers who have attempted to film the play. Yukio Ninagawa is also one of the most representative Japanese directors who sought to adapt Shakespeare's plays within a Japanese cultural context, not on screen, but on stage. He brought his production ofMacbeth to England in 1987 for a theatrical festival called 'the International Theatre '87", organized by the director of the National Theatre, Sir Peter Hall. The festival aimed to stimulate British theatre by inviting eminent directors from abroad, such as Peter Stein, Ingmar Bergman, etc. Ninagawa presented Shakespeare'sMacbeth with Euripides's Medea during the festival, and both of them were greatly admired for the completeness of his staging. Although they were performed in Japanese, his productions were unprecedentedly applauded by English audiences. In particular, his Macbeth was a great success in Shakespeare's own country. These two directors: Kurosawa and Ninagawa, who are from different fields, very interestingly, seek for the same principle to direct their works in the context of Japanese culture. Kurosawa says: ... In this film the problem was how to adapt the story to Japanese thinking. The story is understandable enough but the Japanese tend to think differently about such things as witches and ghosts.' And also Ninagawa questions: To start with, a problem is rhetoric. Shakespeare's rhetoric mostly goes upward: Heaven or God. In Japan, that kind of rhetoric is rarely read. If we replace the rhetoric, which is too difficult for Japanese people to understand, with something visual....... what will become of it?2 Both directors, in their first stage of directing the play in either a film or a stage production, try to make it easy for the Japanese viewer or audience to understand the things that come from the different cultural background of Shakespeare. It is interesting to know that, though they are directed for Japanese people, both of the works are more appreciated in foreign countries than in Japan. Probably, one of the reasons is that, to the foreign audience, the oriental cultural adaptation of a Shakespeare's play is found exotic and brand new in a visual sense, but there must be other reasons why so many critics have sought to analyze the attractiveness of those works. Among European critics, however, there are some people who misinterpret or overvalue them, not knowing well the Japanese cultural background or climate, on which the directors created their own Macbeth. In the first two chapters of this thesis, I would like to explain the cultural background of those works in detail as a means of footnoting the productions for those who are not familiar with Japanese culture. In the third chapter, I will compare the film and the stage production with other western productions of the play: on films, Orson Welles's Macbeth ( 1948 ) and Roman Polanski's Macbeth ( 1969 ), and on stage, Trevor Nunn's Macbeth ( 1976 ), and clarify what is characteristic of the Japanese adaptations and what is their uniqueness when compared to the western productions. Let me first introduce the biographical background of the two Japanese directors. Akira Kurosawa Akira Kurosawa was born in Tokyo in 1910. He intended to be a painter in his youth, while involved with some radical political activities of communism. He sustained his interest in the cinema through the influence of his elder brother, who was a benshi ( a narrator of silent films ) at that time. After he passed the highly competitive entrance examinations for Toho Studios, then called the Photo Chemical Laboratories, he started his film career as assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto in 1936. His debut film as a director was Judo Saga ( Sugata Sanshiro ) in 1943. And later he won the top prize of the Venice Festival in 1951 with his literary adaptation film, Rashomon. He became a world famous film director for that. His adaptations of western literature are as follows: Dostoevsky's