NINAGAWA’S ANCIENT JOURNEYS

     Several of Ninagawa Yukio’s Shakespeare productions exploited a certain touristic image of their original European settings, in particular those of the Renaissance and ancient Rome. The sheep shearing scene in his production of The Winter’s Tale (2008) was dominated by a massive projected still of a detail from Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ (c. 1482), and The Taming of the Shrew (2009) of a detail from ‘The Birth of Venus’ (1486) by the same artist (1); Botticelli was the favourite painter of this aspiring artist turned visual international theatre director (2). Both of these works are kept in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, a popular destination on the Japanese tourist route, as are the remains of ancient Rome, which in his Coriolanus (2007) were represented by steps, recalling Keats’ Spanish Steps (3).

     In a programme note on the production, Ninagawa commented on the intersection of Rome with the Japanese theatre:

Ninagawa spoke of the need to Japanize his Shakespeare productions in order to make the plays accessible to Japanese audiences (e.g. Huang, 87-8), but his fear of ‘embarrassing’ them indicates a deeper purpose.

     A Japanese audience’s embarrassment might be seen to work in two ways: confusion with the unfamiliar but also embarrassment at the limitations of a native culture that forces them to look outside (5). Modern Japanese tourism is to some extent derived from pre-modern pilgrimages to sights of religious and historical importance, for example haiku poet Matsuo Basho’s poetic ‘Journey to the Far North’ (Oku no hosomichi) in the 17th century and most famously the Shikoku Henro, the pilgrimage to the eighty-eight Buddhist temples on the island of Shikoku associated with the 8th century monk Kobo Daishi. Since the complete route of the Shikoku Henro is 1,200 kilometres, one supposes that the pilgrimage is meant largely as a test of stamina and discipline through which the pilgrim acquires merit or karma. Likewise in modern Japan, where non-Buddhist values such as Renaissance humanism and American individualism have long been appropriated through the visual arts and popular music, tourism in Western countries may still be seen as an act of endurance: desirable, even necessary, but still a potentially embarrassing encounter with foreign languages and cultures.

     Embarrassment, as in other Asian societies, is also seen as a loss of ‘face’, which at its worst may incur a suicidal loss of identity, an erasure of the status and hierarchical matrix out of which identity is formed. Japanese tourists may choose to protect themselves from that risk through the paraphernalia of the package tour, while (as I have been suggesting) Ninagawa’s lively ‘international’ Shakespeare productions themselves offer a kind of cultural tourism, a packaged experience of the foreign. In other more personal contexts, loss of identity through embarrassment as a means of self-knowledge, or even simply liberation, may be desirable, and in the context of myth, one may observe the difficulty that modernity has had in reconciling the public and private faces of religious experience, and the consequent appeal of writers like Shakespeare who speak from an age when religious belief could be heretical and therefore dangerous (6), but not an embarrassment in the modern meaning of the word.

     The most ‘embarrassing’ aspects of Japanese religion would be the ecstatic rituals associated with Shinto, when the shaman enters a trance in order to communicate with the gods (kami). Although still widely practiced in South Korea, these rituals have been more or less institutionalized in Japanese Shinto though the ceremonial function of miko, the shrine maidens. The institutionalization or demythologization of Japanese religion began in the Meiji era with the subordination of all cultural practices to the national polity (kokutai), and although religious freedom is guaranteed under the post-war constitution, and there is nothing in principle to prevent Japanese people from believing in a supernatural presence in their lives, Japanese religion nowadays is more generally seen as a range of practices that reinforce social relations and moral attitudes rather than the kind of ‘altered state of consciousness’ associated with shamanism (7).

     This is the difference between ‘cultural myth’ and ‘religious faith’, and it is one that can harbour a deep distrust for any powerful or ecstatic emotion that seems to challenge the individual’s reputation for objectivity and rationality, which is not to suggest that ecstasy is undesirable in itself. Ninagawa’s Shakespeares may sometimes have achieved an ecstatically dramatic impact, as for example in the reunion of Pericles and Marina at the end of his 2003 Pericles, another romance drama, and all four of the Roman tragedies he directed contain potentially (if perversely) ecstatic elements: the sadism of Aaron and Tamora in Titus Andronicus, the love and loathing of the rabble for Coriolanus, the affair of Antony and Cleopatra, and the assassination of Julius Caesar (8). My own first impressions of Ninagawa’s productions in the late 1990s before I had had time to see many other styles of Shakespeare performance regularly were undeniably of an ecstatic, emotive style of theatre (9), and while none of these examples have anything to do with religion, they do relate to Shakespeare’s mythopoeia and to the use that Ninagawa makes of Shakespeare in creating his mythic theatre.

     The Japanese word for ‘myth’ is shinwa, literally meaning ‘divine talk’ or ‘talk about the gods’ (even ‘talk with the gods’). None of Shakespeare’s Roman plays are in that sense mythological dramas, although they do – as narrated by Shakespeare – share with ‘myth’ in the English sense a considerable historical distance from their sources (arguably as much for Shakespeare as for Ninagawa) and a tendency for historical details to be lost, exaggerated or invented. For Shakespeare and his audiences, we know that republican Rome offered a model for Elizabethan court politics (10). In modern Japan, the comparison may run even deeper when one considers that the state Shinto that dominated pre-war Japanese society was polytheistic like ancient Roman religion, that like the ancient Roman gods the Japanese gods have human attributes such as envy and lust, and that many of the gods are deifications of historical Japanese figures, such as the 9th century scholar-poet Sugawara no Michizane (Tenjin-sama), but also including the line of Japanese emperors through to modern times. Japanese believers can converse with the deified spirit of Sugawara at one of the many shrines dedicated to him, just as in Shakespeare’s theatre audiences can be said to converse with the gods and demi-gods of the ancient Roman world.

     One of the persistent features of Ninagawa’s theatre was to transcend the realism of pre-1960s shingeki (modern Japanese drama) by promoting a conversation between actors and audiences. Ninagawa’s role in that conversation was to ensure its smooth flow and avoid potential embarrassment, to show audiences things they might otherwise have missed, and above all to respect the audience’s freedom to construct their own gaze. Ninagawa’s technique was Brechtian and metatheatrical (11).  Actors would appear on stage before the start of the performance to chat with each other, rehearse lines and do their makeup, and then take a curtain call before the show had even begun. This was Brechtian alienation, but it was also a typically Japanese sign of respect for the audience, motivating them to engage intellectually as well as emotionally with what they were about to see. If, then, a Ninagawa production was an intellectual as well as an emotional experience, one basic existential question that spectators might have asked themselves was the extent to which reason and feeling could coexist in Shakespeare, in themselves, and by implication in religious experience as well.

     The English word ‘religion’ is derived from Latin religio, and although its original meaning is disputed is usually taken in the Augustinian sense to mean ‘joining together’ or ‘reconnection’ (12); in Christianity, sacramental marriage is regarded as one example of a practice that sanctifies communal bonds. By contrast, the Japanese word shukyo, meaning ‘ancestral teachings’, is a recent coinage from the late 19th century embracing non-Japanese religions such as Christianity as well as the ancestor worship practiced in Japanese Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism; incidentally, one alternative etymology of religio refers to the ancestor worship practiced in ancient Roman religion. There is of course a vertical, ancestral dimension to Christian practice as well (13), but arguably not to the extent of Ninagawa’s account of how he came up with the concept of his iconical Ninagawa Macbeth (1980) when he was praying one day to the souls of his dead father and brother at the Buddhist altar (butsudan) in his family home (14). 

     The effect of Japanese shukyo may well be that of religio but in its etymology it is the outward observance that is emphasized. Outward observance supports an institution such as marriage but less an arbitrary notion of romantic love as an emotion that is quite separate from the expectations of parents and ancestors who (unlike the Holy Spirit) are essentially historical figures. Romantic love, in this sense, is detached from history, or at least is the beginning of a new history, although in Japanese culture erotic attraction (iro) is appreciated and tolerated as an impulse emanating from the biological and cultural histories of individual bodies.

     As in Shakespeare and in contemporary Western society, this framework allows for a broad range of relationships contrasting physical fitness and attraction with power and knowledge, but the cultural difference can be expressed through the difference between Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Japan’s own festival of love, Tanabata, the Star Festival which takes place every July 7th. Tanabata is derived from a Chinese legend introduced into Japan in the 8th century about two stars, Orihime (the Weaver Princess, the star Vega) and Hitoboshi (the Cowherd, Altair), who fall in love and are married, but are separated by Orihime’s jealous father, the Sky King, who forces her to return to weaving cloth before finally taking pity and allowing the couple to meet once a year; according to the legend, a flock of magpies create the bridge that allows them to cross the Milky Way so that they can meet. This festival celebrates and even ritualizes romantic love as a transitory moment, whereas the love of Romeo and Juliet is also short-lived but eternalized through their mutual suicides, and unlike the Chinese legend achieves the goal of religio, reconciling the feuding Capulets and Montagues. This is not to suggest that religio might not be the effect of Tanabata on Japanese festival goers.

Ninagawa’s ‘Roman thoughts’: a case study (15)

     In Tanabata, romantic love is quite literally externalized through the movement of the stellar conjuction of Vega and Altair. In Romeo and Juliet, external actions such as Juliet’s drinking of the potion and eventually the lovers’ suicides indicate the limitations of experience as drastic measures that are sometimes taken to preserve the integrity of that experience, and as in the Sonnets are memorialized in Shakespeare’s language, notably in metaphors such as ‘star-crossed lovers’ (Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, 6). Critics have long been inclined to forgive Romeo and Juliet their suicides on account of their youth; in other words, suicide is only the most extreme of ‘mistakes’ that anyone could make on the path from childhood to adulthood. For the same reason, Antony and Cleopatra is a more challenging experience (16). 

     Among the comments I have read on personal blogs in response to Ninagawa’s production of Antony and Cleopatra in the autumn of 2011 (17), some (e.g. ‘Ninagawa enshutsu no Antoni to Kureopatra’) relate to the difficulty of finding the middle-aged love affair of Antony and Cleopatra attractive and appealing in the manner of Romeo and Juliet's. This production did not achieve the success of Ninagawa’s Titus Andronicus (2004) and his Coriolanus (2007), but it nonetheless attained certain mythic qualities that I should like to unravel.

     To start with, it adopted one fairly clear dichotomy in the casting of Yoshida Kotaro as Antony and Aran Kei as Cleopatra. Yoshida is an experienced classical actor whose thick-set countenance and vocal range have cut him out for a number of Italian and Roman roles in Ninagawa’s Shakespeare productions. He played Titus in the 2004 production, Menenius Agrippa in the 2007 Coriolanus, in 2012 played Antony again in a production for the small company he founded in 1997, Gekidan AUN, and in 2014 was cast as Cassius in Ninagawa’s Julius Caesar (18). Yoshida is highly representative of middle-aged male Japanese actors, born in Tokyo and raised in the Tokyo theatre. He is also therefore, like Antony, representative of a hegemonic culture, and in that sense was ideally paired against Aran Kei, who was brought up in the western region of Kansai into a Japanese-Korean family, joined the all-female Takarazuka Revue, near Osaka, at the age of 18, and in 2006 became only the second ‘foreigner’ in the company’s history to be named lead otokoyaku (male impersonator); Aran’s otokoyaku experience put her to good stead in portraying the aggressive aspects of Cleopatra’s character. Another parallel can be drawn between the essential role played by Kansai (and, less distinctly, Korea) in the formation of traditional Japanese culture and that of Egypt in the ancient world, and also Greece, from which Cleopatra’s family (the Ptolemaic dynasty) originally hailed. Moreover, Aran was 42 and Yoshida 53 at the time of the production, and so even this age difference was similar to that between the older Antony and younger Cleopatra.

     Ninagawa had been taking his productions overseas since the 1980s, but (perhaps because of Aran’s presence, since her mother tongue is Korean) this one was the very first he had taken to Korea; one could not help feeling that this was yet another gesture in Japanese-Korean cultural diplomacy that even reciprocated the tragicomic elements of Shakespeare’s play (19). Visually, the Roman scenes were dominated by a great white wolf on a plinth suckling the infant twin brothers Romulus and Remus (the legendary founders of Rome), and the Egyptian ones by a sphinx, its nose intact. The wolf had been inherited from Ninagawa’s Titus Andronicus, but whereas in 2004 the grotesque image of the little boys feeding from the teats of the primeval beast added to the mood of menace and horror, in Antony and Cleopatra, the same image defined a faint sense of excess and self-disgust that underscored the tragic elements of the play, while hinting comically (in the way of middle-aged love) that this was not for the first time; no doubt the tragedy of the play was the couple’s complacent assumption that they would muddle their way through on the basis of past successes (20). 

     The lupine grotesquerie shifted our sympathies toward the Egyptian camp, where Cleopatra orchestrated her victory of style over substance, and a downsized sphinx sat tranquil and enigmatic until the final scenes at the monument, when it was replaced by Anubis, canine god of the Egyptian underworld. Although the black dog looked ominous, Cleopatra’s final tableau (as she prepares to kill herself following military defeat and Antony’s death) seemed to be played mainly for laughs. A mysterious rustic figure delivers a basket of poisonous snakes from the country, and he tells her, ‘Yes, forsooth. I wish you joy o’th’ worm.’ (5.2.274), suggesting both a countryman’s view of a notorious femme fatale and a pride in his maudlin trade. This must be one of the more challenging lines that Ninagawa’s translator Matsuoka Kazuko has had to translate, since the Japanese word for ‘worm’ could never mean ‘snake’, leaving one with hebi for ‘snake’, a creature that has positive connotations in the Chinese zodiac. A wizened Aoyama Tatsumi as the Clown delivered the line in a gruffly humorous style that suggested he wouldn’t have minded spending a little more time with this Cleopatra: Hai, dewa. Sono hebi wo otanoshimi kudasai. (‘Well then, have fun with the snake.’) (Matsuoka, 267). Ninagawa also had fun with the snake, a black and white striped creation of two metres in extent, which having done its work on Cleopatra, smooched off stage, drawn by invisible strings. Contrary to popular belief, the asp or Egyptian cobra is of a similar length, although his one seemed neither scary nor erotic.

     Where the production did seem more seriously tragic was in the uniquely exasperated style of delivery Yoshida adopted as Antony realizes the tide is turning against him in the fourth act, and which Yoshida kept up for the remainder, even infecting the inflections of a young, red-haired Enobarbus (Hashimoto Jun). Yoshida’s Antony had taken a step too far in indulging the Asiatic values (the oratory, in particular) that the historical Mark Antony learnt in his youth (21). The dichotomy between the plain Attic and elaborate Asiatic styles is typified by the rapid scene changes in Acts 3 and 4 that Dr Johnson noticed in the 18th century, and which have historically challenged directors (Wilders, 14-26). Ninagawa’s solution was a white oblong box, tapered slightly on both sides which with the aid of projected stills could be transformed from a Roman garden to an Egyptian tomb and so on. Against the box’s symmetry, the still of an image from a Pharaoh’s tomb on the rear flap seemed a little too much, but perhaps this feeling of excess was meant to reflect the self-indulgence of the lovers and of the tragicomic genre, suggesting that both tragicomedy and myth could by their very nature make demands on spectators that ‘embarrass’ and cause them to wonder with Cleopatra whether ‘it be love indeed’ (1.1.14).

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     Ninagawa’s ‘ancient journeys’ fulfill the mythopoeic function of telling Shakespeare’s stories and of asking Shakespeare’s questions. Despite the vast historical gap, the hierarchies that the director identifies in Shakespeare’s Roman plays present certain similarities with contemporary Japanese religion (and, as he noted, Asian society) that may even open up angles onto the monotheism and humanism of Shakespeare’s vision. This is to say that in interpreting Shakespeare, Ninagawa was merely imitating Shakespeare’s earlier act of interpreting his classical and other sources. His most innovative production in this regard has probably been that of Shakespeare’s ancient Greek comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1994), in which the play’s classical elements were reproduced in the ecstatic language of Japanized ritual (Kawai, 275). It is striking too that in his later comments Ninagawa was to became vocal in his defence of Asian theatre in contrast to an overly rational European theatre which he felt had ‘been in decline for some time’:

Ninagawa’s final point reflects the rise of Japanese and other Asian theatres in world theatre, although his emotionalism is derived from the radical ‘underground’ theatre (angura) of the 1960s that sought to overthrow the rationalism of mainstream modern Japanese drama, and drew heavily on Japanese mythology for its themes and inspiration. Ninagawa’s intention, therefore, was not ‘to kill Shakespeare’, but to justify his way of ‘doing Shakespeare’, and in doing so his encounter with the Roman plays may have opened a path into Shakespeare’s humanism – which in his writings and programme notes he praises – that bypassed those aspects of modernity that were less to his taste.

     Ninagawa’s journey through Shakespeare started in the anti-rational and spiritual underground theatre of the 1960s (the angura movement) (22), and in a post-religious society such as contemporary Japan he may even have succeeded in making a religion out of Shakespeare that was analogous to and enriched by Japanese domestic and international tourism with its spiritual dimension. Theatre, like religion, is a communal experience that brings audiences together in a shared space, and a typical Ninagawa run – including performances on tour, Ninagawa’s own ‘tourism’ – could attract a total audience of up to 25,000 at the height of his popularity. Ninagawa’s Shakespeare may have risked becoming obsessed with the details to the expense of genuine ideological concerns, but at the same time his belief in the emotive potential of Asian, and presumably his own theatre hints at the potential for Shakespeare performance in Japan and throughout Asia to channel the suppressed energies and neuroses of a human world and natural environment that are in many respects as threatening as those of ancient Rome and the Renaissance. Let the show go on.