Asian Theatre Journal

In this text, Conor Hanratty presents the first English-language work dedicated exclusively to Ninagawa Yukio (1935–2016) and his long career as part of the Shakespeare in the Theatre series that is both illustrative and comprehensive. Featuring a detailed account of Ninagawa’s Shakespeare productions and his approach to Greek tragedy, Hanratty pays particular attention to examining how Ninagawa Yukio, arguably Japan’s foremost director of Shakespeare, interpreted such foreign works for primarily Japanese audiences. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Yukio Ninagawa has considerable value as both a biography on this acclaimed director and a discourse on approaches to adapting “foreign” material taken out of its original context.¹

Titled “Foreign Stories, Japanese Images,” the first part of this book is largely focused on Ninagawa’s conflation of foreign texts (namely Shakespeare and Greek tragedies) with Japanese aesthetics, effectively adapting work for a new cultural context. Though Ninagawa has been criticized for/accused of being exclusively interested in “marketing a kind of globalized Shakespeare product,” by capitalizing on japonisme, Hanratty refutes this, stressing the director’s dedication to Japanese audiences (p. 60). Rather than for international recognition, Hanratty claims the references Ninagawa chose were intended to communicate to a Japanese audience and rooted in a desire to move away from the “psychological realism” of European theatre and the shingeki theatre’s “artificiality” to create a more “Japanese” kind of contemporary theatre. Hanratty makes a compelling case for this through Ninagawa’s use of Japanese iconography and imagery (most notably inspired by the kabuki and noh theatre); however, given how kabuki and noh have increasingly struggled with lessening interest in performances over the years, this raises the question of whether such arguably traditional imagery might be viewed just as “exotic” by a Japanese audience as with an overseas audience. [End Page 594]

In the following two parts of this book, “Hamlet” and “The Sai no Kuni Shakespeare Series,” Hanratty pays particular attention to these two specific projects in Ninagawa’s directing career. No single play captured Ninagawa’s imagination quite like Hamlet, which he produced no less than eight times throughout his career. In the titular part of his book, Hanratty conducts a detailed overview and analysis of the director’s approach to the play as well as how each of the eight respective productions reflected changes in his directing vision, interests, and overall approach to Shakespeare.

In “The Sai no Kuni Shakespeare Series,” so named after the project started by Ninagawa Yukio to stage all of Shakespeare’s 37 plays,² his dedication to the “Japanese” audience is apparent in his aims to stage Shakespeare’s works for the community in his hometown of Saitama, just north of Tokyo. With each subsequent production, the “Sai no Kuni Shakespeare” series developed its own cultural context and following as the local audience became more familiar with both Ninagawa’s and Shakespeare’s work, making it less necessary for Ninagawa to prime his audience by providing some form of introduction. Hanratty asserts that this in turn made it possible to experiment in terms of design and overall script translation. Of particular interest in this area is Hanratty’s discussion of Ninagawa’s all-male productions of plays such as As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing within the “Sai no Kuni Shakespeare” series, which Hanratty claims have a distinctly “Japanese” character, especially in terms of how the humor and overall play with gender is received by the audience. According to Hanratty, “theatrical play with gender is very familiar to Japanese audiences,” perhaps more so than in other parts of the world as he points to the “monopoly” male performers have in traditional theatre forms such as noh and kabuki, as well as the enduring popularity of the Takarazuka Revue’s otokoyaku and equally pervasive bishounen aesthetic found in Japanese media (p. 141). For this reason, Ninagawa’s choice to cast these productions with all-male casts served as a “nod to the all-male performance practices” of traditional Japanese theatre (p...