Director: Go Miura
Playwright: Yukio Mishima
Institution: Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music
Venue: Debut theatre of SBMA, Mongolia
Time: 09:00, May 21, 2016
Event: 4th Asian Theatre Schools Festival
Director’s Notes
The Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music performs two adaptations of Noh theatre dramas called Modern Noh plays in one hour. Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), a famous Japanese novelist, playwright, and critic, wrote eight adaptations of Noh drama scripts as modern drama style. In particular, five works, The Damask Drum, Sotoba Komachi, Kantan, The Lady Aoi and Hanjo, are well-known around the world having been translated into many languages. Toho Gakuen College has selected two works from them, Sotoba Komachi and The Damask Drum because they typically fit this festival theme. Yukio Mishima was a complicated person in both his writing and behaviour, especially, in his last action in which he took his own life. Without a doubt, his performance impacted Japanese society, as well as, his discourse had submitted some important issues which had an ironic thinking for original form of Japanese culture, and had thought how to accept western culture in Japan through his lifework.
The problematic issue is a common theme for Asian theatre. Many Asian countries imported the modern theatre from the West in the modernization era. At that time, each region's traditional theatre was required to try adapting modern theatre for new transformation forms. Mishima's works are kind of the top achievement as adaptations of modern drama scripts in Japan. Toho Gakuen tries to perform the works by showing the adaptation narrative and acting performances in a mixed structure of traditional, modern, and contemporary theatres.
Synopsis
Sotoba Komachi: A poet meets Komachi, who is an old and dirty looking woman, at a park in Tokyo in the middle of the night. Mishima has replaced the priests’ position in Noh drama for a poet. Komachi expresses her memory when she was in love 80years ago. She reminisces on a night in the 1880s with the poet, who acts the part of the Military Officer with whom she fell in love. After returning to the present, the poet realizes that she is still beautiful although she has ragged clothes and a wretched body. But if the poet expresses her beauty in his voice, the invite result in death. The main theme of this story is the heartless beauty, the original Komachi was offered at the end of the play a promise of salvation after he comes to visit her a hundred nights. However, the modern Komachi is at the end as she was at the beginning, a miserable old woman counting her nightly haul of cigarette butts.
The Damask Drum: An old man becomes enamoured with a neighbour’s lady at a law office in downtown Tokyo. In both versions, Noh theatre and Mishima's modern drama, the old man is told that he will win the favour of his beloved if he succeeds in beating a drum loud enough for her to hear it, but this drum is made of damask, and makes no sound. Therefore, he commits suicide. In the Noh theatre, his ghost returns to torment her with a beating drum. However, in the modern play the lady's love makes her deaf to the beating of the drum, and the ghost is driven a second time to despair.