When Tadashi Suzuki decamped his
theatre company from Tokyo to the remote mountain village of Toga in
1976, the esteemed director, actor and founder of the physically
rigorous Suzuki Method of Acting was making a point. If Tokyo's big
city bustle was a form of insanity, then Togo gave his company the
space to breathe, while Suzuki could flex his creative muscles far
from Tokyo's maddening crowd.
An effect on Suzuki's life's work
from such a conscious seismic shift is inevitable, as Waiting For
Orestes: Electra, his take on Euripides' version of the Greek myth
produced by his Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT), which opens at
Edinburgh International Festival this weekend. In the play, as
Electra waits for her absent brother to help her murder their
adulterous mother who killed their father, given such a dysfunctional
back-story, perhaps it's no surprise that Suzuki has opted to re-set
the play in a psychiatric hospital, where Electra exists in a near
speechless condition.
If such a setting wasn't already
troubling enough, Suzuki reins in his heroine via a chorus of men in
wheelchairs. The metaphors of Electra's inner turmoil - “All the
world's a hospital,” Suzuki has written, “and all the men and
women merely inmates,” - aren't exactly subtle.
“For me,” says
Suzuki, “wheelchairs do not represent a physical dependency on
something outside of ourselves, but rather a psychological dependency
that occurs within ourselves. In other
words, the
characters in wheelchairs in my plays are not physically crippled, or
handicapped in any
way, but rather mentally crippled/handicapped. So, for me, the
wheelchair is a
symbolic device representing psychological phenomena.”
This is an all too
typical approach to the world by Suzuki, who has previously used
wheelchair-bound performers in his Euripides-inspired Dionysus, when
a group who were members of a fictional end of history cult wheeled
themselves onto the stage reciting lines from Macbeth. In Waiting For
Orestes: Electra, as Suzuki has indicated, these figures accentuate
Electra's inner turmoil.
“In Waiting For
Orestes, the two female protagonists are trapped in a state of
criminal
psychosis,” Suzuki
observes. “One has been driven mad by her struggle to justify a
past crime--the murder of her husband, while the other is obsessed
with a crime she has yet to commit, the murder of her mother. In my
opinion, both are equally guilty. Electra shows the process leading
up to the crime and the delusions needed to carry out the act, while
Clytemnestra shows the madness that descends after the crime, and the
vicious cycle of trying to defend it. Clytemnestra is Electra's
future.”
For Suzuki, these
very personal acts of violence have far wider implications.
“Just as
Clytemnestra and Electra use violence to free themselves from the
oppression of their
circumstances,” he
says, “terrorists employ similar tactics to challenge our
contemporary world order. What is important to understand is that any
act of terror is a complex reaction and cannot be
seen as simply good
or evil. The modern terrorist is targeting both the countries they
perceive as
oppressive, as well their own community’s complacency. I believe
these violent
struggles for
freedom could multiply as globalisation expands. One of the main
goals of
globalisation, from
an economic perspective, is the minimising of differences between
peoples in the
interest of financial profit. It is a process of standardising each
market system
to function in
increasingly similar ways. Electra’s fight to maintain her identity
may one day be
shared by all of us,
as we struggle to keep a sense of ourselves in a world that is trying
to
make us all the
same.”
This relate too to
why SCOT exist in Toga rather than a metropolitan hub.
“For me,” he
says, “big cities tend to function better as marketplaces than as
places of creation. This is true whether talking about manufacturing,
sports or the theatre. Manufactures produce their
goods in factories
located far away from urban centres, and then ship these goods in to
be
sold and consumed.
This is done mainly to keep costs down, and to have more flexibility
in
how they manage the
quality of their facilities, workers and products. Sports
organizations
develop training
camps also far from the urban venues where matches are played. This
is
done so the proper
time is taken to train and develop their athletes and teams until
they are
strong and skilled
enough to compete.
“I find that
theatre companies, too, are difficult to form in urban centres. In
addition to the
higher costs of
rehearsing and producing, the city adds many challenges to organizing
people, schedules,
transportation, facilities, etc., which severely limit the time and
space
available for
artistic activity. Moreover, artistic activity in an urban setting
must follow the
civic order
established by the municipality, so that things like rehearsing late
into the night,
or outside, for
example, are much more likely to create conflicts with the
authorities. In the
country, there is
considerably more flexibility, which allows the time and space for a
theatre
group to concentrate
deeply on cultivating a unique style and ensemble awareness, which in
turn fuels the
creation of work on a superior artistic level.”
None of this has
stopped Suzuki travelling the world with SCOT. Since 1972, when
Suzuki was invited to take his production, On the Dramatic Passions
II, to the Theatre of Nations Festival in Paris, he and Scot have
performed at festivals in thirty-one countries. Suzuki hasn't been in
the UK since 1985, however, and Waiting For Orestes: Electra will be
his and SCOT's first EIF visit.
Since his move to
Toga, Suzuki and SCOT (the company name was changed in 1984) have
existed at the epicentre of an internationalist form of
theatre-making. With American director Anne Bogart, Suzuki co-founded
the Saratoga International Theatre Institute in New York, has headed
up numerous international initiatives, and has developed Toga itself
into one of the largest theatrical centres in the world. During this
time, Suzuki has developed his Noh and Kabuki rooted techniques,
fusing them with more contemporary European thinking.
Born in 1939 in the
small town of Shimizu in Shizuoka, Suzuki grew up with his musician
parents, who worked in traditional Japanese puppet theatre. This
early exposure to traditional Japanese art-forms made a deep
impression on Suzuki as a child, and it was only at high school that
he discovered western theatre. Even today, it is Shakespeare,
Chekhov, Beckett, Dostoevsky and Kafka who Suzuki looks to for
inspiration.
Suzuki's early
productions were a steady diet of Russian and American staples; Three
Sisters, The Crucible, Death of A Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire.
While still in his twenties, Suzuki co-founded the Waseda Shogekijo
company with other Japanese artists, occupying a Tokyo-based theatre
space of the same name. This formed the foundations for SCOT, which
Suzuki continues to develop work with.
“Since I started
making theatre, the systems by which humans communicate have changed
drastically,” he
says. “Thus, while my philosophy towards the theatre and what I
perceive to be its
expressive elements,
the actor's body, voice, lights, costumes and music--have not really
changed, the way in
which I use these elements to project my philosophy and world-view
has deepened over
time.”
Beyond Waiting For
Orestes: Electra, Suzuki is already in the thick of typically
audacious plans.
“I am making a
contemporary children's theatre production of Cinderella,” he says,
“where I explore the possibility that the prince doesn't exist.”
Waiting For Orestes: Electra,
EIF, Kings Theatre, August 11-13, 8pm
The Herald, August 10th 2012
ends
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