Encountering European postdramatic theatre in Japan

Last weekend I was in Kyoto. It was also the day of the Moon-viewing (Tsukimi) or mid-Autumn Festival and several shrines in Kyoto organised moon-viewing events. However, I was there for a different reason - to watch the semi-stage reading of Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Dans la solitude des champs de cotton (In the Solitude of Cotton Fields) by Japanese theatre company chiten.* I knew about this company from my producing days when I met a Japanese programmer/producer who told me about their work.  Chiten also did the Japanese premiere of the Nobel-Prize winning Elfriede Jelinek’s Sports Play in 2016 which I produced for the London 2012 Olympics. French playwright Koltès is also well known to me as I have translated and directed his Tabataba in Croatia and France. I have also seen numerous productions of the Dans la solitude. Naturally, I was curious about the approach director Motoi Miura and his actors would take and interested in how their collaboration with French actor Pierre Carnio would turn out. It’s important to note that this performance is a part of Eve Series where the company presents very stripped-down versions of plays. The premise is that the audience encounters a text rather than a staging. So, my analysis here is more of an encounter rather than any kind of review even when it may seem like one. 

First, a short introduction to Koltès’ writing and its place in European theatre context is in order. Koltès writing usually consists of long monologues with very little staging directions. In fact, his texts belong to so-called ‘no longer dramatic texts’, much like Jelinek. They invite directors and artists to put on their unique stamp when staging them, but also in this way the audiences are also invited to engage differently. Audiences and critics are either accustomed to this approach, like in Germany or France or not, like in the UK. Sometimes you won’t understand the meaning, and that’s fine. As my dear friend and director Vanda always says – let it wash over you. Koltès is also the most performed French playwright in the last twenty or so years. He collaborated frequently with the late French director Patrice Chéreau, who also staged Dans la solitude des champs de cotton several times. This is a one-act text for two performers, identified as Client and Dealer, who are discussing a deal to be struck, but the text deliberately omits what the deal is about. As Chéreau noted in his interviews, the word desire appears most often in the play and is the key to understanding this play.

Miura decided to use seven actors for this reading, a very novel approach as this play is almost universally performed by two actors. The second intervention was that all actors had their mobile phones in hands from which they read the text. The semi-staging was in the form of fluorescent light tubes demarcating all four sides of the stage, one microphone and two mobile phones flickering in the recesses on the back wall. Two actors were pinned against this grey wall – one French on the microphone and one Japanese. Other actors were seated on the sides and would switch sides every often in what could be described as a game of musical chairs, except that chairs are not taken away. At one point all their roles are blurred, and they change positions. However, the most interesting thing to me is the interplay between French and Japanese. The whole reading could be described as a simultaneous cacophony of these two languages as the French actor would utter the text in French while Japanese actor(s) would speak over him or vice-versa. The actors also played with intensity of the speech. This directorial approach also heightened our desire to discern the words, to cling onto little snippets of the text either in French or Japanese (or both for speakers of both languages).  In that sense, chiten tackled well the notion of ‘desire’ that Chéreau mentions. What also shines through Koltès’ text and in this reading is the inability to communicate with one another. None of the actors face each other nor speak directly to each other or to the audience. They are completely absorbed into reading the text on their white-like cotton smartphone screens and swiping away with their fingers. At some point the actors also add additional sounds to the text, such as a little gasp which brings fort the idea of desperation, desolation in contemporary society. If there is one thing that I could nit-pick here was the use of soundtrack. At times it felt unnecessary as actors seemed to follow its rhythm rather than the rhythm of the text. Overall, I felt that Miura’s reading is entirely appropriate, playing with Venutti’s notion of foreignisation and domestication, and compelling even at its most dragging moments.

Yet, it felt easy for me, as a European, accustomed to seeing and knowledgeable about this kind of theatre to understand this. No wonder this is the case given that Miura has inevitably been influenced by his encounters with French theatre. By contrast, I wonder how foreign, especially European postdramatic texts are being received by Japanese audiences. This evening, they were applauding very little at the end which is the same at every performance I saw until now in Japan. This is similar to audiences in the UK, although attitudes have been changing recently. From what I could see, they seemed to be keen on learning more about the company because they stayed on after the performance in the space. Like with Okada’s company, they do seem to have a loyal following. In addition, when it comes to small theatre companies, what I find quite interesting is that theatre criticism in the mainstream media is practically non-existent. At times, it feels like we are heading in that direction in Europe, apart from Germany. I suppose, I should also mention the theatre space where it was performed - Under Throw, a basement space run by the chiten in northern parts of Kyoto to create and present their own works. Miura explains its establishment better in an interview , but from what I’ve seen so far in Japan, this is very unusual and it follows European repertory model.

I’m leaving the venue with a strong desire to see their Jelinek production in seven languages later this year, but at the same time with a feeling of guilt that I have indulged in a perfect example of European theatre in Japan. Perhaps that is the very essence of encounters – sometimes we need to see the familiar.

* Note that many Japanese performance units do not capitalise their names, so where appropriate I am following the same.