Theatre: Japanese incensed by theme of historical play

By MIKE HOULAHAN

Outwardly, for the past 50 years, Japan has been a democratic nation of peace and equality with no discrimination, theatre director Koichi Kimura says.

"In reality, this is not so."

Saying that as a personal view and putting it on the stage are two separate things though. When his Chijinkai Theatre Company, in New Zealand for Festival 2000, first staged their production of The Great Doctor Yabuhara by Hisashi Inoue, it caused a sensation.

Although set in the 17th century, the play's first audiences saw a comment on modern-day Japan on stage, and many were not impressed.

In the 1600s, Japan's many blind people formed a structured union to administer trades, such as acupuncture and shiatsu, through which they made their living.

The play centres on one union member, Suginoichi. He is a kengyo, a very high position within the union. He is also manipulative, vindictive, Machiavellian and villainous.

"The union was given a special right from the authorities to conduct a money-lending business," Kimura says.

"This was a kind of social welfare policy. Some of the blind took advantage of this welfare policy and gained huge profits by practising usury.

"The story of a physically handicapped person - a blind man's evil deeds - was quite a shocking one and it was groundbreaking and sensational for that reason alone."

Hisashi Inoue began his career as a playwright in the late 1960s. Unlike his contemporaries, whose leftist ideologies were translated into works of socialist realism, Inoue gained attention for his bright humour, wit and word-play.

The Great Doctor Yabuhara (1973), Inoue's first collaboration with Kimura, surprised its audience with a black and humorous portrayal of a villain's world.

"Although Inoue himself does not admit it, some people say that his enthusiasm to open up new frontiers probably made him choose this subject material," Kimura says.

The director says compared with the majority of Japanese playwrights after the Second World War who were greatly influenced by Western European and American theatre, Inoue's style is immersed in a deep knowledge and understanding of Japan's traditional theatre.

"Through this play, he has acquired a technique for turning around kabuki's beauty of brutality into a black comedy," Kimura says.

"Although the style of The Great Doctor Yabuhara is a life-story of a fictitious villain, many of Inoue's works take a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creativity of Japanese poets and writers and cleverly blend it with fiction. Those works manifest the shaping of contemporary Japanese people and society.

"Inoue is probably Japan's most powerful contemporary playwright."

Ironically, it was Kimura's reverence for theatre's past which brought him and Inoue together. Kimura had made his reputation staging 17th-century English plays, so period pieces were familiar territory.

He tells Suginoichi's story in a dazzling manner, which draws elements from kabuki, manga comics, Jacobean drama and Brecht. Giant flying puppets, swathes of bright-coloured cloth and showers of soba noodles are just a few of the visual elements used as the play's 10-strong cast juggle more than 30 roles.

Although gorgeous to look at, the cavalcade of colour in no way distracts from the hard-hitting message of The Great Doctor Yabuhara, Kimura says.

"We cannot overlook the superficiality seen in the caring and protection of the handicapped nor the hypocrisy that lurks in the hearts of the non-handicapped," he says.

"From that perspective, the main character's villainous deeds - his being born into a very poor family, blind, but living with all his might until his gory death - gives us a feeling of thrill.

"When compared to the apathy of the normal person, there is an exciting sensation and many people in the audience seem to have felt sympathy and sorrow for the villain. They probably thought today's society abounds in apathy and hypocrisy, too."

- NZPA

* Chijinkai Theatre Company's production of Hisashi Inoue's The Great Doctor Yabuhara runs in Wellington from March 22-25 as part of New Zealand Festival 2000.