Suzuki Tadashi's "The Chekhov": Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and Uncle Vania

Suzuki Tadashi's "The Chekhov": Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and Uncle Vania IAN CARRUTHERS Suzuki Tadashi's first production as a student was Chekhov's short comedy The Anniversary, and his engagement with The Three Sisters dates back to a 1961 staging that was controversial because he refused to make it a vehicle for the radical politics demanded by the Communist-dominated Waseda University Drama Society. Yet the student's view of Chekhov "as a critical realist, one who exposed the conditions for revolution in the present"l continued to inform his major productions of Chekhov in the 1980s and 199OS. In 1986 Suzuki premiered Three Sisters alongside The Cherry Orchard as The Chekhov, the "Japlish" tille functioning, like the title Ninagawa Macbeth ,' as a sign of radical re-culturation. Uncle Vania was added as a middle play in 1988; in a 1989 restaging, the sequence was changed to make it the conclusion of the trilogy. The addition of the new play, followed by the reordering , made each of these three productions seem remarkably different, forcing surprising new jnsights in the contextualised meanings generated between actors and audiences.' Then in 1992 he produced Ivanov as part of two different trilogies: The Farewell Cult (with Dionysus and Macbeth) and Greetings from the Edge of the World. Most recently, in 1998, Suzuki has juxlaposed scenes from Ivanov, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, The Seagull, and Ibsen's A Dol/'s HOllse in Kagami no Ie {The HOllse ofMirrors}. As a whole, his approach is at once modem, building on both Beckett and the New York avant-garde, and ancient, embodying Noh and Kabuki conventions hitherto ignored as passe by Shingeki (realist) companies. This combinalion is striking, generalizing Chekhov's themes and using consciously bizarre juxtaposilions to represent contemporary Japan. The nearest Western equivalent might be the Mabou Mines approach to the classics (which had been demonstrated in Japan at the Toga International Festival in 1982 and 1984).4 In What Is Theatre, Suzuki explained the basis of his approach to Chekhov, pointing out that Modern Drama,43:2 (Summer 2000) 288 Suzuki Tadashi's Chekhov even now we are not able to escape from the outlook of the human being which Naturalism advances. When Idirect Chekhov, Jfeel the need to recreate this outlook with precision. In my production of Three Sisters, when the actors say "We must live," they curl up in chairs, and are force-fed rice. Or three old ladies sit on toilets, standing on lOp of them at the end to declare "We must live!" I can defend such stagings because humans, no maHer how confused their inner life may be, cannot very well do without continually eating, excreting, and babbling everyday. Chekhov wanted to emphasize tliis common quality of mundane human existence so the audience might feel it. These sorts ofcharacters divert the audience from their own paralysis for any number of hours. This is the Naturalism that 1think Chekhov imagined.s His final point here explicitly casts Chekhov as a forerunner of Beckett; and there were clear echoes of Beckett's plays in The Chekhov - particularly Suzuki's use of large wicker baskets to hold pairs of characters. In addition, his program notes for the trilogy, which defined his directorial aims, also suggested the way his stylistic juxtapositions brought out the decper parallels: A special feature of the characters in Chekhov is that they're incapable of facing reality.... Their erasu're of their humanity in the gap between dream and reality is a theme that has been treated by many modem playwrights. But what Chekhov described and tried to dramatise was not so much the character of the person with desires and illusions, but that very gap itself. Ihave tried [0 push this special quality in Chekhov's theatre as much as Icould because this is where Ithink his true modernity lies.6 I dismantled the characters ofChekhov's story, selected only those words which seemed to express this sense [of gap] and tried to find visual equivalents for them.1 The stage set for Three Sisters is classically balanced and severely frontal. Before two shOji (sliding paper-screen doors) upstage left and right stand...