Zen Zen Zo's Macbeth (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Zen Zen Zo’s MacBeth Owen E. Brady Zen Zen Zo’s Macbeth. Adapted from William Shakespeare. Seibu Kodo, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. 27 May 1995. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Zen Zen Zo’s Macbeth, directed by Simon Woods at Seibo Kodo, Kyoto University, Japan. Seized by students in the 1960s and run by them still, Kyoto University’s Seibu Kodo stands isolated in a pitted, unpaved lot strewn with refuse. This is the ramshackle headquarters for Zen Zen Zo, a theatrical experiment in cross-cultural form. A multinational troupe directed by Australian Simon Woods, Zen Zen Zo has experimented for three years with fusing Japanese performance techniques and classical Western theatre texts. Something new results: a performance text that might best be called a Butoh meditation on a Western classic. With Shakespeare’s Macbeth as metatext this season, the troupe’s Japanese, Australian, and American actors created a performance text distilling Macbeth’s deep and dark desires into a raw, expressionistic, Butoh-inspired hell broth of horror and fatality. With Shakespeare’s text cut and fragmented into thematic shards of language, the production relies heavily on the human form, dance, and composer Colin Webber’s driving, percussive music to communicate Macbeth’s slide into hell. Supporting characters and plot lines have been pared away, revealing Macbeth’s mythical core. To give symmetry to the bilingual aspects of the performance, there are four witches—two speaking in English, two in Japanese. Inspired by Shakespeare’s bloody man motif, the opening sequence uses images and nonverbal sounds, creating a lurid image of a man in hell. Macbeth, played by Hideyuki Hiraoka, appears sculpted in red light, shrouded in fog. To pulsing, percussive music and guttural sounds, he breaks from his frozen pose and moves a bamboo staff through a fluid series of slow-motion gestures, recalling both Butoh and the heroic poses of Kabuki samurai. In tattered black slips, the witches crawl through the audience hunting their prey. With Macbeth still upstage, they form a chorus downstage, performing a lewd, frenetic come-on. Thrusting hips and breasts frantically forward, then suddenly squatting obscenely, they tantalize and appall Macbeth, while chanting phrases from Shakespeare’s text, alternately in Japanese and English. As an expressionistic interpretation of character, this production elevates the witches’ role. They are always present: often foregrounded downstage; sometimes twining themselves around characters; occasionally upstage observing, wrapped around the stark wickets of the stage design. When Macbeth and Banquo encounter them, the witches dance their prophecies; and Macbeth stands, eyes growing wildly wide, as the seeds of ambition take root. Macbeth delivers soliloquies contemplating the king’s death in Japanese with the witches, sometimes crawling up his legs like serpents, repeating key phrases in English, representing his inner tension. Later, as the dagger surfaces in Macbeth’s mind, they ensnare him in a net of bamboo staves. As emanations of his lust for power, they dance a ritual murder of the king while Macbeth kneels downstage in darkness bent by the music’s driving percussion. Lady Macbeth, too, serves expressionistic ends, more an emanation of Macbeth than an independent character. Throughout, the production links Macbeth, his partner, and the witches, creating a union of evil. He remains on stage as she reads his letter about the prophesies. Stripping the text to the “unsex me here” speech completes the chain of evil, linking Lady Macbeth visually with the witches. In a slow-motion recapitulation of their squatting earlier, she intones her lines about infernal motherhood. Helen Smith’s Lady Macbeth squats as if to ditch deliver evil into the world; hands become claws as she encourages the murdering ministers to take her milk for gall. The sleepwalking scene turns into a ballet for the damned. Intoning only “Out, damned spot,” Smith’s Lady Macbeth pirouettes into hell to percussive piano and drums, while the witches mouth fragments of her speech, English echoing Japanese. During Macbeth’s “tomorrow” soliloquy, she remains on stage. Standing midway on a runway slanting from the back of the auditorium to the stage, Macbeth groans in Japanese while Lady Macbeth, arms outstretched, hovers above him, echoing his soliloquy in English...