My first hybrid show with a live audience since the pandemic, Matsukaze, was a strange beast. We chose to adapt the Noh theatre show of the same name, and after an intense development and rehearsal period that lasted almost 8 months, I played midwife to a very different tale than what we started with.
The original story is a traditional buddhist morality play about the dangers of attachment: two young women are romanced by a Genji-style nobleman, and when he leaves, they pine after him until they die and become ghosts. The play centres, as Noh plays so often do, on a traveling monk, who falls asleep and dreams of the women’s ghosts. At the end of the play the younger sister is able to let go and move on, while the elder is not.
The version I created with the ensemble instead centered on the two women and reset the show during Japan’s bubble era. The two women were not sisters, but immigrants from repressive communist countries (China and East Germany) studying in Japan. Fuuko, the East German, had a scholarship to study art, and came from a very working-class background, whereas Ameko, the Chinese woman, was studying hotel management, and came from a comparatively privileged background.
The play was about them coping with, among other things, the reversal of their respective statuses due to their ethnic backgrounds (more important in Japan than their socio-economic backgrounds), their own cultural baggage, love, and capitalism.
The set was a long alley with a mirror on one side, a bulging projection screen on the other (with a tree that rolled on and off between the two halves of the screen), and an audience at either end. The idea materialized as I was showing our set designer (Gordon Evans) around the space and said “I’ve got this crazy idea. Talk me out of it.” He didn’t even try to talk me out of it!
You can still pay to watch the recording of the show here.
