A Season in Intercultural Limbo: Ninagawa Yukio’s Doctor Faustus, Theatre Cocoon, Tokyo

Of the handful of non-Western Shakespearean directors whose shadows stretch beyond their home countries, few cast a more formidable shadow than Ninagawa Yukio. His patented style, a flamboyant synthesis of Eastern aesthetics and Western texts, has entranced audiences from Tokyo to Stratford—although perhaps not always, as we shall see, for the same reasons. In his landmark Macbeth (premiered in Tokyo in 1980, performed in Edinburgh in 1985), Ninagawa framed the stage as a giant butsudan—a Buddhist altar for commemorating dead relatives—and metamorphosed Birnam wood into a roving grove of blossom-spangled cherry trees. He relocated The Tempest (1987) from an anonymous Mediterranean isle to the Japanese island of Sado-ga-shima and associated Prospero with Zeami, the thirteenth-century founder of noh drama who was exiled there. In 1994, he uprooted A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the Athenian woods, transplanting it to a Zen rock garden in Kyoto. Critics, especially Western critics, were awed by the visual poetry of his productions and the elegant allusions to traditional Japanese culture. Ninagawa’s work has even been given the radiant imprimatur of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), which invited him to England on two separate occasions to direct productions of King Lear and Titus Andronicus.¹

In the wake of these initial accolades, however, a few Shakespeare scholars began to voice some sobering qualms. Kishi Tetsuo and Yeeyom Im have rebuked Western reviewers for drawing sloppy parallels with kabuki and noh theater, and accused Ninagawa of a kind of theatrical orientalism, a gratuitous exoticizing of the plays that detracts from the text.² Certainly, any foreign spectator (particularly one such as myself with only a limited command of Japanese) needs to remain wary of succumbing to an aura of Otherness when attempting to decipher the work of non-Western directors. Nevertheless, auditing the complex cultural exchange that occurs when Shakespearean drama is reimagined on the international stage remains an urgent task for performance criticism. As Dennis Kennedy observes, “If we are to make the study and performance of Shakespeare fully contemporary and fully international we must worry less about his textual meaning and more about his prodigious appropriation (or misappropriation) in a global context.”³ But who can determine, and on what grounds, that Shakespeare has or has not been appropriated properly? While the Meiji era (1868–1912) witnessed a number of experimental adaptations in which Shakespeare was Kabukified, Japanese theater would, following a pivotal staging of Hamlet in 1911, seek to establish its authority by imitating Western standards of psychological realism, going so far as to replicate Royal Shakespeare Company set designs and to outfit Japanese actors in blond wigs or prosthetic noses. This Westernized style of performance came to be known as shingeki (New Drama). While researching this essay in the summer of 2010, I attended a shingeki performance of Hamlet in Tokyo modeled on Peter Hall’s 1965 RSC production, complete with a replica of John Bury’s ebony-walled set. Curiously, the show shared the stage on alternating nights with a Chinese production of Hamlet, a fact that conveniently illuminates the current predicament of Japanese theater, torn between Eastern and Western prototypes. This predicament finds powerful expression in Ninagawa’s work. Because the director creatively mingles Eastern and Western styles with apparent abandon, his Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare have been dogged by accusations that they are neither Shakespeare nor authentically Japanese.⁴ When Ninagawa brought an English-language Lear to London in 1999, many reviewers, irked that the Japanese visual rhetoric and the English verbal rhetoric failed to coalesce, seemed stranded in what Kennedy terms a “cultural no-man’s land.”⁵ Yet Ninagawa’s drama, I will argue, may be most provocative when it deliberately conspires to expose, rather than conceal, the cultural fault lines that persist in modern Japan and in the global mise-enscène of late capitalist society.

Since the late 1980s, Ninagawa has become, for better or worse, something of a poster child for intercultural theater. The very label “intercultural” remains a vexed category in...