NAKAMITSU. To 16 June.
London
NAKAMITSU
by Zeami (?) new version by Benjamin Yeoh
Gate Theatre 11 Pembridge Road W11 3HQ To 16 June
Mon-Thu t.30pm Fri 7pm & 9pm Sat 5pom & 7.30pm
Runs 55min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706
Review: Timothy Ramsden: 2 June
Old and New style Japan yoked together.
To Western audiences Noh Drama can seem just what it sounds (the late Bernard Levin reported falling asleep during a performance, awaking to find that, never mind the plot, the actors hadn’t moved). It’s not exactly a hot ticket back in Japan either.
Highly formal, it involves music and dance, both key to the Gate’s reworking of a brief script (a bare dozen pages) which won Benjamin Yeoh the Gate Theatre & Oberon Books Translation Award.
Though the added modern-day opening, a world away from the society of supposed author and Noh progenitor Zeami (died 1443), is in Japanese. Entering through silver-slash, audiences find the kind of entertainment patronised by businessmen and for taking part in which performers have been known to suffer honour killings by family members. On a stage-strip thin as a tongue, seamily sexual provocation goes under the name of dance, till such a relative, or rival, enters, armed.
Customer and dancer vie to be the one he shoots, but when the bullet’s fired, there’s a formal change to traditional costume and the story of Nakamitsu is played as a parable, before a final return to gunpoint in the modern day.
The title character serves Lord Mitsunaka. The Lord’s son has been sent to study in a mountain monastery but has wasted his time. It’s something brilliantly shown in Jonathan Munby’s production as Bijiyo returns home with Nakamitsu, and stands on a bright cloth failing to read its supposed inscriptions, then being tied in it and dragged punitively by his angry father.
Ordered to behead the wastrel, Nakamitsu finds his own son Kochiyo offering to take the fatal punishment instead. With both young men offering to die, Nakamitsu decides as a loyal servant. The outcome and its consequences have a formality but also a forward-moving impetus. Strong, economically-expressed performances surround Richard Clews’ Nakamitsu.
Clews is finely cast, bringing his gravity of bearing and rich voice to the role’s dilemma, while Ansuman Biswas provides a score, played live, that’s dominated by resonant or hard-beating percussion; it’s widely different from yet relates to the disco-world of the modern frame.
Kochiyo/Weshin: Peter Bankole
Bijiyo: Matthew Burgess
Nakamitsu: Richard Clews
Mitsunaka: Daniel Williams
Musician: Ansuman Biswas
Director Jonathan Munby
Designer: Mike Britton
Lighting: Hartley T A Kemp
Sound: Paul Arditti
Choreographer: Michael Ashcroft
Music: Ansuman Biswas
2007-06-03 12:00:35