--> Not I transl. and dir. by Kimura Yusuke at the Theatre Lumen, Kyoto May 30 2019 http://yusuke-kimura.net/ Samuel Beckett’s Not I is a surreal horror of a one-woman show. A Woman’s mouth only is seen, high above the stage, absurdly higher than if she were standing, framed in spotlight. As the light fades in, the sounds of her gasping, whispering, urgent voice is heard before the lights fade up on the mouth, lips painted brightly, teeth, tongue; even her throat is visible in a kind of red-grey chiaroscuro. She is speaking to herself, a stung creature, like the ox-sister Io in Euripides’ Prometheus . Words spill from her unwanted, a verbal diarrhea, before she thinks them, allowing us to see her forming the words and reacting to them in real time, reversing normal order. Each impulse, each fragment, amended or doubled-back upon, rejected or extended—returns her to a continuous loop, recurring inside her brain but vocalized for us. A silent, lonely woman su...
an occasional document of theatrical life in Kyoto and the virtual world at the beginning of the 21st century