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Japan Modern Theater
Modern drama in the late twentieth century consisted of
shingeki (experimental Western-style theater),
which
employed naturalistic acting and contemporary themes in
contrast to
the stylized conventions of Kabuki and No. In the postwar
period,
there was a phenomenal growth in creative new dramatic
works, which
introduced fresh aesthetic concepts that revolutionized
the
orthodox modern theater. Challenging the realistic,
psychological
drama focused on "tragic historical progress" of the
Westernderived shingeki, young playwrights broke with such
accepted
tenets as conventional stage space, placing their action
in tents,
streets, and open areas and, at the extreme, in scenes
played out
all over Tokyo. Plots became increasingly complex, with
play-within-a-play sequences, moving rapidly back and
forth in
time, and intermingling reality with fantasy. Dramatic
structure
was fragmented, with the focus on the performer, who often
used a
variety of masks to reflect different personae.
Playwrights
returned to common stage devices perfected in No and
Kabuki to
project their ideas, such as employing a narrator, who
could also
use English for international audiences. Major playwrights
in the
1980s were Kara Joro , Shimizu Kunio, and Betsuyaku
Minoru, all
closely connected to specific companies. In the 1980s,
stagecraft
was refined into a more sophisticated, complex format than
in the
earlier postwar experiments but lacked their bold critical
spirit.
Many Western plays, from those of the ancient Greeks to
Shakespeare and from those of Fyodor Dostoevsky to Samuel
Beckett,
were performed in Tokyo. An incredible number of
performances,
perhaps as many as 3,000, were given each year, making
Tokyo one of
the world's leading theatrical centers. The opening of the
replica
of the Globe Theater was celebrated by importing an entire
British
company to perform all of Shakespeare's historical plays,
while
other Tokyo theaters produced other Shakespearean plays
including
various new interpretations of Hamlet and King
Lear.
Suzuki Tadashi's Togo troupe developed a unique kind of
"method
acting," integrating avant-garde concepts with classical
No and
Kabuki devices, an approach that became a major creative
force in
Japanese and international theater in the 1980s. Another
highly
original East-West fusion occurred in the inspired
production
Nastasya, taken from Dostoevsky's The Idiot,
in which
Bando Tamasaburo, a famed Kabuki onnagata (female
impersonator), played the roles of both the prince and his
fianceé.
Data as of January 1994
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