The Theatre Times: With William Shakespeare’s iconic use of English lost in translation, bold and reimagined versions of his works have long blossomed in Japan, as dramatists have mainly taken inspiration from the storylines instead.
For example, two highlights from the past 20 years would surely be The Kyogen of Errors, a 2001 take on The Comedy of Errors in traditional comic kyogen style by Mansai Nomura, and Hideki Noda’s 2019 production Q: A Night at the Kabuki, a Romeo and Juliet story set in medieval Japan, with a soundtrack taken from Queen’s classic 1975 album, A Night at the Opera.
5 comments:
I really appreciate the playwright’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Most people know Romeo and Juliet as a play about love, the “star-crossed lovers”. But rather than focusing on romance, he anchors the play on human prejudice. Although this theme has always been present in Shakespeare’s original script, I think emphasizing will bring a different perspective in seeing Romeo and Juliet and truly universalize the experience. I also like the specificity that exists in Chong’s version of the play. It’s set in the 1950s, post-war Japan. I think it adds a layer of complexity into character relationships as well as make this human prejudice theme easier to understand for the audience. It is slightly more modern and the audience probably has a closer connection to it. I would have loved to hear more about Chong’s decision to cast an all-male cast and what that entails in the interpretation of the script.
I think what the playwright is doing with Romeo and Juliet is a really good idea. I really like to see adaptations of shows because I think it is so impressive how creative people can be with stories that we all know. This playwright is doing something especially interesting by changing the ending of the show because he is altering the story of the show to have an impactful message on the audience of this particular show. I love theatre that has a reason and this really does have a reason. Sometimes I question why people adapt works instead of just writing their own new ones, and this playwright really did think through why he was adapting this show at this time in this place, which I really appreciate. I really like reading articles about theatre in other parts of the world because I love to see the similarities and differences to how we think about theatre here, but it also makes me sad that I read about these shows that I would love to see, but that I can’t see.
I think it was a very interesting approach, using a classic shakespeare storyline to make a modern and relevant cultural statement. It is nice to sometimes have shows that don't necessarily have a deep, heavy underlying message to think about, but at the same time, even the most innocent seeming fairy tales have morals. I think it is very thought provoking when a director decided to take a more innocent, or straight-forward story and then bury modern social commentary within it. For example, my senior year, we did Beauty and the Beast as our spring musical. The director talked to us a lot about the current presidency, and the state the country is in, and how when a leader is beastly, the people become beastly too, and how physical differences divide people, out of fear of differences. I lived in Japan for a short amount of time, and it is a very homogenous country, where xenophobia is very relevant. I have respect for this director, cast, and crew, for using their art to speak out.
After watching “100 Years Stray” produced by Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and having a chance to work on a play “Hanjo”, both originally written in Japanese, recently I have been thinking about what is the right way to perform a translated theatrical piece. What is the permissible range in the loss of a cultural context? How much should the piece be open to the audience interpretation? My initial idea was that because Japanese language has such a unique cultural background, the piece would lose so much of the context when translated into English, in contrast to anything translated from English to Japanese. However, I might be setting up a too narrow frame including the observer bias. How could I forget the William Shakespeare’s works, which is said to lose 70% in translation? Although there is a significant difference between Japanese and English in terms of language, the evaluation of how different production produces different interpretations of the original text is surely a worldwide subject. This interpretation of Romeo and Juliet seems very interesting, I love how the story is developed far beyond the romance, which we all have heard enough of. It is so sad that the production of Crying Romeo and Angry Juliet had to close 5 days prior to the last performance due to the coronavirus development. I am so sorry.
Personally, I think that this is possibly the best take on “revamping” Shakespeare that I have ever read about. I think that directors and creative teams often try too hard to take modern problems and force them around and into a production but it seems here that they have instead stripped down the piece to its core and started building and shaping and forming the desired conflict into the piece. I think that Natsumi does make a good point about themes getting lost in translation when a piece is taken out of its native language but - to me, at least - I feel like the themes of “Romeo and Juliet” are easy enough to transfer between a multitude of language even if it is not a word for word, inflection for inflection translation of the piece.
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