The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi (review)

Suzuki Tadashi has become the first Asian theatre director in Cambridge's series Directors in Perspective, edited by Christopher Innes. Ian Carruthers wrote most of this book; co-author Takahashi Yasunari, due to his progressive cancer, contributed primarily as an advisor, reading Carruthers's final draft before he died in June 2002. Participation by Takahashi, who had worked closely with Suzuki since the 1970s, is invaluable, heightening the accuracy of the record—especially in regard to Suzuki's early theatrical activities—and offering viewpoints by theatre specialists from Australia and Japan. Additionally, Takahashi's two essays, reprinted from past publications, appear as the introduction and the concluding chapter. In the former, Takahashi, going against the widespread view of Suzuki in the West, makes a bold and iconoclastic statement, calling Suzuki "neither an anachronistic chauvinist exploiting a 'samurai exoticism' nor a superficial cosmopolitan smoothing over undeniable differences" (5).

Protected by Takahashi's spirit, Carruthers looks at Suzuki's contribution to contemporary Japanese theatre and describes how Suzuki's work is "not exotic but ordinary" (73), as Suzuki has said of his training method. Carruthers defines Suzuki's approach through observation of his training and major productions from both sociohistorical and scientific perspectives, characterizing his energy as spilling over cultural boundaries to create a new fusion between the East and the West.

In his chronological study, rich in translated materials on Suzuki's theatre by Suzuki himself and other Japanese artists and theatre scholars, Carruthers discusses Suzuki's work through its various stages: from the days of the Waseda Free Stage in the late 1950s to the formation of the Waseda Little Theatre in 1961; his involvement in Jean-Louis Barrault's Théâtre des Nations Festival in Paris in 1972; his move to Toga villages and formation of SCOT (Suzuki Company of Toga) in the mid 1970s; and finally, the most recent performance in 2004. Carruthers succeeds in conveying how Suzuki has integrated the new and the old in training actors and making his theatre. Discussing the social, political, and historical background of postwar Japan, Carruthers explicates why Suzuki's theatre was born in the Japanese context.

Carruthers argues that Suzuki's theatre developed through his flexible absorption of input from his collaborators, such as playwright Betsuyaku Minoru and actor Ono Hiroshi in Waseda Free Stage, and Waseda Little Theatre's leading actress Shiraishi Kayoko. Following Betsuyaku's departure from Waseda Little Theatre and Suzuki's breakthrough to the new style of centering, physical acting, and the actor-devised "kabuki phase," Carruthers navigates the unbroken chain of Suzuki's exchange of ideas and techniques with theatre practitioners and scholars from Japan and the West. Readers learn that Watanabe Moriaki—a professor of French literature at Tokyo University and a Claudel specialist—planned the first presentation of Suzuki's theatre in Paris. After the Paris production, Suzuki began to work closely with the Noh actor Kanze Hisao. The production inspired Grotowski to visit Japan to attend Waseda Little Theatre's rehearsals in 1973. As a result, Grotowski brought Suzuki's On the Dramatic Passions II to Warsaw. Meanwhile, in 1981, anthropologist Yamaguchi Masao arranged to bring Suzuki's The Trojan Women to Brooklyn College, and facilitated his encounter with Victor Turner. The festive space of Barrault's Recamier Theatre became a model for Suzuki's Toga in the late 1970s. Architect Isozaki Arata contributed to the creation of the environment for Suzuki's theatre, designing Toga's amphitheatre and a renovated farmhouse, Sanbo. Philosopher Nakamura Yujiro corroborated Suzuki's theory of theatre. Finally, the co-author of this book, Takahashi, was Suzuki's dramaturg.

The chapter on training, subtitled "The Sum of the Interior Angles" (borrowed from the title of a collection of Suzuki's essays on theatre in 1973), is extremely informative and valuable. Precisely recording and succinctly analyzing the movements and steps in the Suzuki training method, this chapter can serve as a comprehensive manual for actors who would like to study the Suzuki technique. The...