Archived: August 2005 – Modern Noh Plays Review @ Variety.com
A Lincoln Center Festival presentation of two plays (“Sotoba Komachi” and “Yoroboshi”) in two acts by Yukio Mishima. Directed by Yukio Ninagawa. Choreography, Uran Hirosaki.
“Sotoba Komachi”
Old Woman – Haruhiko Jo
Poet – Yo Takahashi
“Yoroboshi”
Toshinori – Tatsuya Fujiwara
Shinako Sakurama – Mari Natsuki
Mr. Kawashima – Tetsuro Sagawa
Mrs. Kawashima – Machiko Washio
Mr. Takayasu – Mikio Shimizu
Mrs. Takayasu – Tomoko Jinbo
As coups de theatre go, nothing trumps a production that ends with the playwright killing himself. That’s the riveting moment of truth in this doubleheader by novelist, playwright and cult figure Yukio Mishima, whose ranting voice is heard at the end of the show in a recording made in 1970 as he stormed Japanese defense ministry headquarters and committed ritual suicide in a gesture of political protest. Echoes of the playwright’s shouts persist in the distressed voices of the alienated youths who are central figures in both plays, boldly staged by Yukio Ninagawa for this year’s Lincoln Center Festival.
As these meticulously well-wrought works illustrate, Mishima was a master craftsman who used himself as the centerpiece of his plays and then wrote as if his life depended on the perfection of his art. In a way, it did, because it was through art that this tormented genius tried to resolve the existential dilemma of living according to Japanese custom in the postwar context of an alien and, to him, hostile Westernized world.
Striving for a state of balance to contain the volatility of this political dichotomy, Mishima built these two plays on the ancient bones of Japan’s traditional Noh theater. But he fleshed out those classical bones with contemporary (1950s and ’60s) characters and themes.
The triumph of the Ninagawa Company production (which won the Critics Award at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival) is that it preserves that perfect aesthetic balance while using modern stage technology to expand on the scribe’s original vision.
“Sotoba Komachi” (1956) faithfully observes 14th century Noh rituals in telling the old tale of a loathsome crone (played with exquisite seductiveness by Haruhiko Jo) who is transformed into a beautiful woman before the wondering eyes of Takahashi Yo’s fashionably romantic young poet.
Keeping to theatrical traditions, female roles are played by male thesps; physical transformations occur as if by magic; and the central debate turns on the ineffable connection between beauty and death — a favorite theme of Japanese drama, now as then.
But in a radical departure from tradition, Mishima frames the narrative with a mise-en-scene that sets it in a contempo urban park, where the old hag and the poet discuss the dangers of love among young couples on benches passionately groping one another in the lamplight. In Ninagawa’s directorial vision, the scene becomes a romantic symphony of swaying trees, refracted moonlight and softly falling red camellia petals.
More to the political point, though, the scene in which Jo makes his stunning transformation into the ravishing young Komachi takes place in the past, in the public park outside the Tokyo social hall where postwar Japan was seduced by infusions of Western culture that ultimately proved irresistible. In this context Komachi’s dire warning, that beautiful things can kill the poet and destroy his soul, takes on the darkest of meanings for a Japanese audience.
The playwright’s bitterness about the Westernization of Japan is even more palpable in “Yoroboshi,” which is largely unrooted from formal Noh traditions and takes place entirely in the present. The lithe and luscious heartthrob Tatsuya Fujiwara strips off and gives a ballistic perfperf as a youth blinded as a child in an air raid on Tokyo.
Set against the chilling bureaucratic backdrop of a gunmetal-gray ministry office that houses a domestic relations court, the drama positions young Toshinori between two sets of parents — those who gave him life and those who adopted him after the war — and challenges him to make his choice between them. But Toshinori is apoplectic with rage against both sets of claimants, who are allowed no distinguishing East/West differences to give some drama to this static courtroom event.
As the stage is bathed in a flaming red light, the golden youth whom everyone loves and wants to possess rends his clothing and delivers an apocalyptic vision of the fire that consumed his sight, leaving him with a nihilistic belief that civilization has burned itself to the ground — and a blinding hatred for all authority figures who would argue otherwise.
It is at this point that Ninagawa pulls off his coup de theatre — leaving no doubt that, in some quarters and on some level, Mishima’s rage is still burning. Original production design, Kaoru Kanamori; stage design, Tsukasa Nakagoshi; lighting, Tamotsu Harada; costumes, Lily Komine; hair and makeup, Chimaki Takeda; sound, Masahiro Inoue; production stage managers, Mahito Horiuchi, Yoshitaka Shiraishi. Opened, reviewed July 28, 2005. Closed July 30. (Performed in Japanese with English supertitles.) Running time: 2 HOURS, 15 MIN.
Source: JapanTimes.co.jp
