The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi (review)

Japanese western-oriented theatres have produced many performances of western playwrights, including Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, since the reopening of the doors to the west in the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, it has been Shingeki [new theatre] that has played the main role, sometimes urging the people to adopt western cultural values and sometimes seeking to indoctrinate them with leftist thinking. At the same time, the Japanese traditional theatres – Noh and Kabuki – have survived and were reappraised by the theatrical innovators of Shogekijyo Undo [little-theatre movement] in the late 1960. s. They found and drew much nourishment from both the theatrical aesthetics and the unique acting style of Japanese traditional theatres in order to protest against the didactic posturing of Shingeki intellectual elitists and relocate their work in a current global trend. Among the innovators, Suzuki Tadashi is the foremost director and producer. This book offers a rich variety of information about Suzuki, both from the historical perspective of his theatrical career and from the standpoint of comparative culture.

Eight of the nine central chapters of The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi are written by Ian Carruthers and feature multiple viewpoints on Suzuki's theatrical achievements. These include a discussion of the development of Suzuki's company and of his policies during the period from his university years to his directorship of the Shizuoka Theatre Olympics; an exploration of the characteristics and maturing of Suzuki's actor training between 1976 and 1995, focusing on five key periods and drawing on the author's own experience; and a description and analysis of Suzuki's theatrical productions. The book offers a good survey of Suzuki's work from the 1960s through to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This survey is categorized into his adaptation of Japanese classics, his Euripides, his Chekhov, and his Shakespeare.

The introduction and concluding chapters are by Takahashi Yasunari, who died in 2002 and was a leading Shakespeare scholar and energetic supporter of the postmodern theatre movement. Although his introduction to the theatrical background of and the concluding chapter on Suzuki's King Lear are rather short (they are reprints of other writings), Yasunari's observations enrich the other chapters. Forty-two photographic illustrations are particularly helpful in clarifying the image of Suzuki's performances, and a chronological table of Suzuki's professional career and a selected bibliography should also be useful for researchers.

Throughout the volume, we can recognize that "[Suzuki] has traveled so far in his quest for a new dimension of theatricality that few but the die-hard purists among critics would talk about his desecrating the holiness of traditional forms" (253). In this sense, the first chapter, "Rethinking Japanese Theatre: Cracking the Codes," provides a good starting point. Carruthers begins this chapter with Robert Wilson's remark about theatre being a tool that poses more questions than answers and also cites Wilson's invocation of André Malraux on the importance of creating a balance between the art of our nation and the art of all nations. These concepts of questioning and balance are surely key to an understanding of Suzuki's work, alongside his consciousness of traditional kata [patterned forms of acting], which has given specific form to the direction and acting in Noh and Kabuki performances. Thanks to the author's clarification of these p oints, S uzuki's r etreat from Tokyo to Toga a nd the main motivation for his actor training (which are the focuses of chapters three and four, respectively) are made clear. Suzuki's move from the capital city to a remote mountain area was based on the concept of "decentralization" and was intended to restore the balance between opposed cultural binaries, such as the city and country, high and low, and elite and popular. Similarly, the "secret" of the Suzuki Method – as Ann Bogart remarks, "Compression makes expression possible" (72) – is achieved through the energy that is "the consequence of tension between opposing forces" (80).

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