Saturday November 15 at Osaka Noh Theatre
Sekine Masaru is an interesting guy. Born into a noh family and trained as an actor, he became an academic (literature) and published books on Zeami and Yeats. Returning to Waseda now teaching performance at the Liberal Arts College and Japan, he continues to build bridges with his Roma Kyogen group. Students from Italy learned Japanese through kyogen, then performed adaptations of Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost. He experimented with commedia dell'arte adaptations to the noh stage. Now he is in the midst of the ambitious Si Project, directing 4 Shakespeare tragedies interpreted with noh, kyogen, and opera techniques.
Hamlet, his first outing, was a failure in my opinion. While getting an interesting melancholic Dane out Zenchiku Tadaaki, the rest of the actors stuck to their own strengths: opera, djambe African drum, and three foreign players moving in a mixed salad remarkable only for the combination rather than any inherent necessity. Nothing was learned of Shakespeare or opera or kyogen--only that they didn't combine well on the stage. Despite other comments (
So it was with mixed feelings of hope and dread I attended LEAR (others who attended HAMLET were so leery of LEAR, they stayed clear) last week, and was happy to see a totally different production aesthetic. The African drum, a loud and irritating percussive presence when solo, meshed into an energetic team player when paired with okawa legend Okura Shonosuke. The battle scenes, and scenes of blindness, death, and treachery were especially potent due to these two. With Lear's collapse, the hoarse-breathed final Iyaaaa of Shonosuke, a death-rattle and choke--left the stage in a profound silence. This is what Junko Matoba means by the Beckettean Yohaku in her fine little book: the margin or frame of whiteness that makes the deft strokes at center so powerful in painting or performance.
The acting was uniformly good: operatic Cordelia, two onnagata in black wigs as her two cunning sisters, a standout Edmond in black-spiderweb kamiginu, and a tenor-clown Clown that wasn't cowed by the kyogen professionals around him. Some moments of especially fun:
-the binding of Kent on hashigakari while the sister's cooed with Edmond in waki-za
-the blinding of Gloucester, discovered by Edgar, not a naked mad Jack but Buddhist priest
-Cordelia comforting the mad Lear with a children's song
-the Clown explaining the King's demise as the mole tricked the boar down a hole, with cardboard cutouts, in rapid song
-Shonosuke's eery Mongolian vocalization (no drum) during a central scene of pathos
Of course, the fusion director found fault with many things, as usual:
-central area too busy; drummers should have been in jiutai area, diagonally
-stool with music unprofessional at this level for Djembe player
-curtain calls with actors still in character go against the entire meaning of "theatre"
-Lear, while old and gaunt and occasionally hoarsely moving, showed little self-understanding, development, nobility at the end--and therefore pathetic rather than tragic figure
-by losing jack in tatters scene, a whole other dynamic of father-sons father-daughters mad/play-mad was lost
-The funny and dramatic scene, adapted to Don Kenny's fine kyogen, where blind Gloucester thinks he's leapt from the cliffs, is strangely omitted here. In fact Edgar is nothing but a righteous idiot from start to finish
Still, the audience was very supportive, even my students--10 went--wrote favorable reviews of what they could get from it. Not an easy thing, as I well know, to please Shakespeareans, kyogen connoisseurs, and the general theatre-going (or not-) public. But I would say, on the basis that my wife and daughter also enjoyed it immensely in Kyoto the following week, that Sekine has struck the proper balance between strangeness and familiarity, stylization and psychological energy that pulses through a true play.
I look forward to OTHELLO next year.
For a different viewpoint, damning with faint praise perhaps, see
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