The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi (review)

Suzuki Tadashi has been an active, influential figure in Japanese theater for nearly 40 years, and while his work has received international acclaim, attention, and interest, there has been comparatively little critical analysis of his place in world theater history. This is to some extent understandable—the act of contextualization is of course most easily carried out once a person has stopped being productive, and yet the interesting thing about contexts is how they are transformed through that process of production. The notion of transformation is central to this book, taking as it does for its subject the "greatest subversive achievements" (p. 3) of Suzuki Tadashi and setting out to prove that "he is neither an anachronistic chauvinist exploiting 'samurai exoticism' nor a superficial cosmopolitan smoothing over undeniable differences" (p. 5), but rather a visionary who, "through his rigorous and continuous negotiation of the many dislocations between traditional Japanese theatre and Western-imported realism . . . more than any other living Japanese theatre artist, has contributed substantially to the modernization and postmodernization of Japanese theatre" (p. 5). While this may sound hyperbolic, the book's authors do much to substantiate this claim, in a style that is amusing, informative, and personal.

Suzuki Tadashi is, of course, the director of SCOT, the Suzuki Company of Toga, and the creator of the Suzuki Method of actor training, itself a world-renowned technique for bringing out tremendous physical presence and power in its practitioners. As Robyn Hunt describes the method, it was "designed to strengthen the connection between voice and movement, and the power of the whole body to speak even when the voice is silent." Instructors offer classes in the Suzuki Method throughout North America and Europe and so train actors able to overcome the problems of presentational and acting styles that do "not involve the whole person."¹ But Suzuki Tadashi is of course more than simply a trainer of actors, and his method involves more than simply rigorous discipline. Carruthers addresses this himself in a chapter devoted to Suzuki Training, where he mentions and critiques some of the various writers who have tried to describe and engage this method, principally James Brandon, who was one of the first outside Japan to write of Suzuki's work.

One of the undeniable strengths of the work is its exhaustive effort to situate Suzuki's theatrical developments within a context of not only Japanese avant-garde theater in the 1960s and 1970s, but also within trends in world theater. To this end, the introduction and the first two chapters include much history, not only of academic interest, but of interest to anyone with even a passing curiosity about the changes in theater over the past 100 years. These are structured chronologically, beginning with Suzuki's early life and family upbringing, but moving quickly to his first involvement with theater as a student at Waseda University in the very early 1960s, and from there to his exposure to nō, ironically enough, in Paris in 1972. These chapters provide a solid historical base upon which Ian Carruthers builds his presentations and analyses of Suzuki's productions. Carruthers is certainly an appropriate presenter of this material, having had both a long association with Suzuki's troupe and method, as well as a close relationship with the volume's coauthor, Takahashi Yasunari, who passed away before the work saw publication. Takahashi's contributions to the work, the introduction which contextualizes Suzuki within Japanese theater and the final chapter which discusses Suzuki's adaptation of King Lear, are mature, insightful chapters and attest to the great loss to the academic and theater worlds his passing entailed. He himself had worked with Suzuki as a member of the Rei no Kai (The Blank Society), the discussion group sponsored by Iwanami Shoten during the 1970s, and as such was in a good position to observe the developmental process...