Suzuki, Shingeki, and Western Theatre

The way Japanese Theatre has evolved over the years is a very interesting global theatre discussion. The chapters we read for class today took us, as reads, comprehensively through the journey of modern Japanese Theatre. For me, the most interesting aspect of the reading was the Japanese desire for a more westernized theatre, its reception, the actual works theatre artists like Osanai and Suzuki produced, and the ways in which they challenged traditional Japanese Theatre practices.

The article opens up with a short anecdote about the Japanese Theatre artist Osanai and his desire to explore and produce realistic plays based on the work Stanislavski was doing at the Moscow Art Theatre. Osanai’s theatre, Shingeki admired, “the dramaturgy based on the dialectics of conflicting powers, the acting style aimed at the life like portrayal of individual characters…and the underlying assumption that the ultimate standard of reality is logical explicability. His travels to Russia allowed him to study Stanislavski and bring those methods back to Japan and in turn a brand new way of approaching theatre gave birth to a new Japanese theatre movement.

Suzuki jumped on this boat when he started producing theatre in mid-twentieth century. His early adaptations of plays like Macbeth, Death of a Salesman, and The Trojan Women had mixed reviews. However his merging of the traditional Kabuki with Realism gave way to a new “collage” theatre form that was widely received earned him the attention of the International theatre community.

As far as Global theatre is concerned Suzuki’s efforts are truly monumental. He found an interesting way to blend tradition Japanese theatre styles with a westernized theatre approach making him, in my opinion, the essence of what a global theatre artist should be. His efforts have helped to bridge the gaps between theatre styles from two completely different cultures and uses aspects of both to create a new. If we want to be successful “global” theatre artists we have to steal a page from his book and challenge ourselves to bridge gaps between more and more cultures.