Shakespeare in the Theatre: Yukio Ninagawa

Conor Hanratty, Farah Karim Cooper, Peter Holland, Bridget Escolme

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350087361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro shakespeariano

Yukio Ninagawa (1935–2016) was Japan's foremost director of Shakespeare whose productions were acclaimed around the world. His work was lauded for its spectacular imagery, its inventive use of Japanese iconography and its striking fusion of Eastern and Western theatre traditions. Over a career spanning six decades, Ninagawa directed 31 of Shakespeare's plays, many of them, including Hamlet, on multiple occasions. His productions of Macbeth, The Tempest, Pericles, Twelfth Night and Cymbeline became seminal events in world Shakespeare production during the last 30 years. This is the first English-language book dedicated exclusively to Ninagawa's work. Featuring an overview of his extraordinary output, this study considers his Shakespearean work within the context of his overall career. Individual chapters cover Ninagawa's approach Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, in particular his landmark productions of Macbeth and Medea, and his eight separate productions of Hamlet. The volume includes a detailed analysis of the Sai-no-Kuni Shakespeare Series – in which Ninagawa set out to stage all of Shakespeare's plays in his hometown of Saitama, north of Tokyo. Written by Conor Hanratty, who studied with Ninagawa for over a year, it offers a unique and unprecedented glimpse into the work and approach of one of the world's great theatre directors.

1

Introduction

The first part of this introduction examines the productions that Ninagawa Yukio directed between October 2004 and November 2006, when I lived in Tokyo. Ninagawa turned seventy in 2005, and the year was focused on celebrating this milestone, at the Bunkamura Theatre Cocoon and the Saitama Arts Theatre in his hometown. Ninagawa was the artistic director of both venues,¹ and he created distinctly different programmes for each. Bunkamura presented a series responding to Ninagawa’s career to date, while in Saitama Ninagawa began a new phase of the Sai no Kuni Shakespeare series, his ambitious attempt to stage all Shakespeare’s plays. The eighteen shows Ninagawa directed between 2004 and 2006 reflect specific aspects of his career. Some projects were nostalgic, but many were innovative and forward-looking; several major initiatives and collaborations in the final decade of Ninagawa’s life trace their origins to this period. This book focuses specifically on Ninagawa’s Shakespeare productions, but these were by no means created in a vacuum. Besides almost fifty separate productions, of nearly all Shakespeare’s plays, Ninagawa directed over a hundred plays by other writers. The decade after my time in Tokyo showed no relaxation of pace: between 2007 and his death on 12 May 2016, Ninagawa directed over seventy-five more plays. For ease of reference, given this extraordinary output, I use the list of shows created during my time in Japan as a lens through which to examine certain interests and approaches that appear throughout Ninagawa’s career.

Biography

Ninagawa Yukio was born in October 1935 in Honmachi, part of Kawaguchi City in Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo. Of its busy foundries, Ninagawa remembered how ‘the labourers came from all over Japan; Kawaguchi itself gave the impression of a human slag heap. Scenes of masses of people were burned into my memory from childhood’ (Miyashita, 1987: 402). His mother took him to kabuki performances from a very early age, and these frequent visits had a strong impact on Ninagawa’s sense of the theatrical. He applied, unsuccessfully, to study painting at Tokyo University of the Arts, and instead became an actor. In 1955 he joined Gekidan Seihai (Young People’s Theatre Group) and began studying with its director Kurahashi Ken, a professor at Waseda University. Ninagawa was eventually made a full member of the group and stayed with Seihai for the best part of a decade. He acted in a variety of projects, including a performance as the queen in Jarry’s Ubu Roi. He also appeared in several films and television shows, among them Matsumoto Toshiro’s Funeral Parade of Roses, set in the underworld of 1960s Tokyo. His most memorable screen performance was as a theatre director in the award-winning 1984 film W’s Tragedy.

Gekidan Seihai was founded in the early 1950s by former members of the Bungakuza, Japan’s foremost shingeki company. Translated literally as ‘new drama’, shingeki developed during the early twentieth century as a modern theatre style, eschewing the traditional performing arts and emulating the realism of modern European and American drama. Working with Seihai, Ninagawa was drilled in the Stanislavski-inspired, text-based approach integral to many shingeki companies. Script analysis was a central tenet of their approach to any play, and while Ninagawa would eventually rebel against much of what he learned with the company, this textual analysis remained central to his working method throughout his life. When Kurahashi left the company, Ninagawa soon followed, and, now in his early thirties, turned his attention to directing.

July–December 2004

My first experience of Ninagawa’s work was in the mid-1990s, when I saw excerpts from his Medea in a BBC documentary. I was fascinated by its beauty and its dramatic power. It inspired me to study Greek at school and then drama at university, before combining these with an MA in Greek Theatre Performance at Royal Holloway in London. My thesis analysed Ninagawa’s 2002 Oedipus Rex. Happily I saw the show in Athens as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2004, weeks before I finished the dissertation. While I completed it, Ninagawa was back in Japan, directing an all-male As You Like It for the Sai no Kuni series. The experiment marked a turning point in his interpretation of Shakespeare and led to a series of several all-male productions in Saitama, discussed in Chapter Four.

After my MA I was awarded a Japanese Government Monbukagakusho Scholarship, and I moved to Tokyo in October 2004. Before I left, I saw Ninagawa’s English-language Hamlet at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth. This was his second English-language Shakespeare production, after a King Lear with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at the turn of the millennium that was savaged in the press. A similar fate had befallen Ninagawa’s 1992 Peer Gynt, presented as part of the cultural programme of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics and performed in London and Oslo. English critics consistently praised Ninagawa’s vision and ability when he presented works in Japanese, but his English-language productions were never as well received.

In late 2004 Ninagawa remounted two plays that had been instrumental to his early success. In December a new production of Romeo and Juliet opened at the Nissay Theatre in Tokyo, marking thirty years since Ninagawa’s first production of the play. The 1974 version was a major success, launching his commercial career. The majority of the plays Ninagawa directed during the 1970s reappeared throughout his career; among these were King Lear, The Water Magician, Mishima Yukio’s Modern Noh Plays, Oedipus Rex, Medea and Hamlet. The theatrical approaches Ninagawa devised for each of these plays evolved over the years, but a seam of interpretative continuity in each can be traced back to this highly creative experimental period. The 2004 Romeo and Juliet toured Japan and proved that even thirty years later Ninagawa still had new things to say with the play. Casting Fujiwara Tatsuya as Romeo ensured its commercial success, and the young film star developed into a fine actor under Ninagawa’s tutelage. He had played Hamlet in Ninagawa’s most recent Japanese-language production. It was a Hamlet very much for young people, starring popular young actors in a new translation of the play. Romeo and Juliet continued in this vein.

Late 2004 marked three decades since Ninagawa’s first Shakespeare and a quarter of a century since the debut of his career’s most successful production, Akimoto Matsuyo’s Suicide for Love. The play is an ingenious interweaving of stories and characters from three plays by ‘Japan’s Shakespeare’ Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Chikamatsu was the poet par excellence of Japan’s puppet theatre, bunraku. He wrote over three hundred plays, several of which deal with love suicides. Stories of such pacts between doomed lovers were so popular in Chikamatsu’s time that they led to alarming numbers of real-life copycat deaths.² Although the source material was written for bunraku, Akimoto’s play and Ninagawa’s production successfully translated the stories into performances by live actors. The production was an early example of Ninagawa’s supreme gift for spectacle. The design featured astonishing evocations of eighteenth-century Osaka, vibrant crowd scenes and an extended snowstorm during the climactic double suicide of Chubei and Umegawa. Theatre critic Senda Akihiko has written that Ninagawa was the first director to match the scale and ambition of Akimoto’s theatrical ideas in performance (Senda, 1997: 104).

Suicide for Love was enormously successful and was performed over a thousand times between 1979 and 2005, substantially more than any other Ninagawa production. He directed several other plays by Akimoto over the subsequent decades, including Namboku Love Story, Kaison: The Priest of Hitachi and Genroku Harbour Song, his last ever show at the Theatre Cocoon in early 2016. Suicide for Love was the most enduring of their collaborations, and its final performances at the Hakata-za in Fukuoka were a fitting start to Ninagawa’s celebratory year of 2005.

Ninagawa x Cocoon

As Suicide for Love opened, Ninagawa began rehearsals in early January for the first of four productions in a programme celebrating his seventieth birthday at the Bunkamura Theatre Cocoon. Ninagawa’s first production at Bunkamura had been in 1996, and he became the theatre’s artistic director in 1999. Each of the four plays in the Ninagawa x Cocoon programme responded to a particular element of Ninagawa’s work. The series featured a play by Shimizu Kunio, an ‘angry young man’ play from the 1960s, a Greek tragedy and a play about Japan’s relationship with Shakespeare. Each was a response to (or a celebration of) a significant aspect of Ninagawa’s career.

Opened in 1989, Bunkamura (which translates as ‘cultural village’) is an entertainment complex owned by the Tokyu Group in Shibuya, Tokyo. It houses a concert hall, cinema and museum, as well as the 747-seat Theatre Cocoon, the site of over fifty Ninagawa productions between 1996 and 2016. These included works by Shakespeare and Sophocles alongside important Japanese playwrights such as Mishima, Noda and Shimizu. For Ninagawa x Cocoon it might have been feasible to remount, say, Hearty But Flippant, Medea, Suicide for Love and NINAGAWA Macbeth – his first ever play, the first ever to tour internationally, the most successful and the most critically acclaimed of his Shakespeare productions. Four such revivals might have been a mouthwatering prospect for anyone who had not seen these landmark productions but would have been utter anathema to Ninagawa. Despite the consistent attention to the passage of time, and repeat engagements with particular plays, his focus was always on forward motion and improvement, on addressing problems that he had not quite solved. An obvious indication of this drive is his eight separate productions of Hamlet, discussed in Chapter Three.

Ninagawa x Cocoon relied on groundwork laid by earlier productions. In his first decade there Ninagawa had already presented an eclectic mix of plays, including Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, the kabuki-derived ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, Chekhov, Brecht, Tennessee Williams and a new production of the aforementioned Hearty But Flippant. The 2005 programme bridged the gap between nostalgia and forward motion, acknowledging earlier successes but also presenting works that were new to Ninagawa. The first production of the series was by one of Ninagawa’s earliest collaborators, Shimizu Kunio. Ninagawa directed more plays by Shimizu than by any other writer apart from Shakespeare, and their collaboration was a critical part of Ninagawa’s career.

Ninagawa met Shimizu during the 1960s when they were introduced by Kurahashi Ken at Gekidan Seihai. When Seihai declined to produce one of Shimizu’s early plays – despite Ninagawa’s support – they both felt their days with the company were numbered, leaving soon afterwards to found Gendaijin Gekijo (the Contemporary People’s Theatre). Theirs was one of a great number of companies within Tokyo’s Little Theatre Movement, often known as angura, from the Japanese transliteration of ‘underground’ (andaguraraundo). Gendaijin Gekijo’s first production was Shimizu’s 1969 play Hearty But Flippant, performed at the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka, a cinema that permitted live performances after its final screening every evening. This was a play about waiting in line, an all too common feature of contemporary Japanese life. Tokyo had seen countless riots and demonstrations through the tumultuous 1960s, between the resistance to Japan’s renewal of the controversial ANPO Security Treaty in 1960 and the violent student protests in 1968. Tokyo citizens had accordingly become used to the sight of the kido-tai, the riot police. Shimizu’s play ends with an execution, but Ninagawa’s final coup-de-théâtre was to surround the applauding audience with actors costumed as the aforementioned riot police, barring the exits. The stunt had an enormous impact, launching Ninagawa as a director to watch. Ninagawa soon directed Shimizu’s Let’s Lay Flowers There Tomorrow – the play that Seihai had earlier rejected. Shimizu and Ninagawa remained collaborators after Gendaijin Gekijo disbanded in 1971, and launched another company, the Sakura-sha, or Cherry Blossom Company. Ninagawa directed five further plays by Shimizu, all presented at the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka.

In 1974 Nakane Tadao, a young producer from the entertainment conglomerate Toho, invited Ninagawa to direct a commercial Shakespeare production for the Nissay Theatre. Ninagawa accepted, but members of the Sakura-sha felt that his taking the job was a betrayal. The company was in something of a creative rut, but there were still numerous plans afoot for further productions. All of these would have to be abandoned if the director absconded to direct for a huge commercial venue. Ninagawa took the job, and the Sakura-sha ceased operations soon afterwards. The resulting feeling of ostracization haunted Ninagawa for much of his career. One project in development at the time of this crisis was a proposed version, by Shimizu, of the story of Masakado. Taira no Masakado, famous from The Tale of the Heike, led a massive rebellion against the government in Kyoto. The Sakura-sha were trying to find a way to frame the ancient story in a way that reflected contemporary politics.

I was thinking about doing […] a play on Masakado, who rebelled against the establishment of the time somewhat like Macbeth. It would be about a lost war leader’s revival – the story of a leader who died in Kyoto and whose head suddenly appeared in Otemachi in Tokyo. I wanted the story of a leader’s revival to connect with our theatre company’s revival. What I was asking Shimizu to write was quite different from what we had been doing before. (Ninagawa, 1995: 209–10)

Ninagawa was hoping, too, for a different style of writing, a different way of communicating even, and Shimizu endeavoured to factor all of this into the play he eventually wrote and completed in 1975. The play tells the story of Masakado from the perspectives of several of the people in his life as he himself goes through a fever dream of madness. The historical character was eventually decapitated, and the play’s full title has an inference similar to the English phrase ‘lost his head’. By the time Shimizu finished it, the Sakura-sha had been disbanded and Ninagawa had taken the leap into the commercial unknown, directing the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet.

Ninagawa and Shimizu reunited in 1982 for Shimizu’s In that Rainy Summer, Thirty Juliets Came Back. This beautiful play features a homage to Takarazuka, Japan’s distinct genre of all-female musical theatre. The story is built around a company’s efforts to stage a production of Romeo and Juliet. It is surely no coincidence that this was the play-within-the-play in the project that reunited Shimizu and Ninagawa, since the same play had precipitated the dissolution of their company. Ninagawa directed several more plays by Shimizu in the 1980s and 1990s, including Tango at the End of Winter, performed in Edinburgh and the West End in 1991. The play tells the story of an actor who has travelled back to his hometown, where his family runs a cinema. Having abandoned the stage, he is haunted by memories of past performances, and as his mind collapses the people in his life try to help him. Ninagawa directed the premiere in Japanese starring Hira Mikijiro, and then in English it starred Alan Rickman. Of the four productions that Ninagawa directed in English in the course of his career, Tango was perhaps the best received. Revisiting what might have happened if he had not directed that first Romeo and Juliet, Ninagawa finally brought his spectacular interpretation of Masakado to the Cocoon stage in 2005, three decades after Shimizu finished it.

After Masakado came Wesker’s The Kitchen, written in 1959. It was translated into Japanese by Odashima Yushi, known primarily for his translations of Shakespeare. Odashima’s translations were the basis for many of Ninagawa’s most famous productions, and he also translated a wide variety of English-language playwr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Foreword Thelma Holt, CBE
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Text
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Foreign Stories, Japanese Images
• 3 Hamlet
• 4 The Sai no Kuni Shakespeare Series
• 5 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint