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

Abstract

O 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