KING LEAR

ARTICLE

1. The Japan Times - Kris Kosaka

A year of Lear: Four new stagings hone in on the tragedy’s timeless lessons

A rare alignment of stars formed on the Tokyo theater scene as four major productions of William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” unfold, all within the span of one year. Two of those have already concluded. Last October, Shinobu Otake, three-time Japan academy award winner, stage and film actress, challenged the tragic and traditionally male monarch with a subversive twist.

This May, veteran Shakespearean actor and director, Kotaro Yoshida, who was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon (a biannual honor for accomplishments in academics, sports, culture and arts), played the tragic king in a string of performances at the Saitama Performing Arts Theater. The play is part of the theater’s acclaimed Sainokuni Shakespeare Series, which cycles through all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, and after its Tokyo premiere it toured domestically this summer.

This month through Sept. 22, kabuki actor Nakamura Shikan VIII is portraying Lear in a play directed by Takaaki Inoue at Tokyo’s Shinbashi Enbujo Theatre. It’s Inoue’s third collaboration with Nakamura on a Shakespeare play after productions of “Othello” (2018) and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (2022). Finally, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre’s Playhouse premieres its “King Lear” on Sept. 21, with Seiyo Uchino in the main role.

“King Lear” is considered one of Shakespeare’s great four tragedies, alongside “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “Othello.” Although it rarely ranks at the top, its titular aged monarch, whose plan to divide his kingdom among his three daughters sets the plot in motion, is a coveted role among actors.

The Japanese actors who played the king this year join a global uptick in Lear productions that’s been gaining steam since 2023 and includes illustrious names. In October 2023, Sir Kenneth Branagh played Lear in London’s West End, before the production traveled to New York. Several other stagings of “King Lear” have made headlines across Europe and the United States, too. This November, Sir Ian McKellen, who has performed the role of King Lear over 1,000 times, will premiere a new Lear at the Yard Theatre in London. Tickets sold out immediately, according to the website.

But beyond the prestige among theater circles, is there another reason that “King Lear” is experiencing a surge in popularity?

The weight of this sad time

The directors of the recent “King Lear” productions in Japan identify the lessons of the early 17th-century play as applicable to our times. “The play holds a mirror up to our restless world with its questions on hard power,” Phillip Breen, the British director behind the gender-swapping production starring Otake, tells The Japan Times.

“The deeper question for the world — but also a specific question for Japan — is ‘what are the implications for a country where an older generation clings on to power and property? And what happens when America abandons its position of hard power? Who rushes in to fill the vacuum?’” Otake’s brilliant portrayal of Lear as a cantankerous, coarse military ruler emphasized these timely undercurrents to widespread acclaim. Shintaro Mori, who is directing the upcoming “King Lear” at Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre’s Playhouse, says interpreting Lear as an authoritarian dictator is only one of many possibilities.

“Shakespeare’s plays are full of gaps — the spaces between lines that are filled with omissions and leaps. There are infinite ways to fill those spaces,” Mori says. “There are endless discoveries in Shakespeare.” The directors are building upon a celebrated history of Shakespeare stagings in Japan, most notably by the late Yukio Ninagawa, who is hailed as the country’s most important Shakespeare director. His groundbreaking 1980 “Macbeth” set in the Sengoku (Warring States) Period (1482-1573) with authentic samurai armor and falling cherry blossoms earned him an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002, among his many national and international accolades.

Inoue, who considers Ninagawa his mentor, assisted him on three different versions of “King Lear” over decades of working under the director. He recalls Ninagawa using a rain of stones in two Lear productions to represent the famous storm, visually evoking the damaging emotional tempests in the play.

“Ninagawa was always asking how the play connected to the present time,” says Inoue, expressing his constant aim to “inherit” this way of thinking for Shakespeare.

Speak what we feel

These four productions offer not only different takes on the characters, setting and staging but also on language — each uses a different Japanese translation of “King Lear.” “It’s difficult to think of another work, in film or any other art form, that can be interpreted so differently while using the same foundational text,” says Inoue. For his production with kabuki actor Nakamura, Inoue selected British history expert Mikiko Ishii’s 2021 translation.

Breen worked “word by word” for over two years to create a fluid, natural script with translator Hiromasa Kiuchi and interpreter and translator Yoko Tokita. The Saitama Performing Arts Theater production went with the translation by Yushi Odashima, known for revolutionizing Shakespeare into modern Japanese and Ninagawa’s translator of choice in his early career. Mori works from the acclaimed translation of Kazuko Matsuoka, the first woman to translate all of Shakespeare’s dramatic works into Japanese.

Whatever the specific translation used, the way Shakespeare’s early modern English is ported to the stage shares some DNA with other modes of Japanese theater.

“Shakespeare isn’t everyday language, and kabuki isn’t contemporary spoken Japanese either. (Nakamura) Shikan is uniquely able to speak those heightened words through the body itself,” Inoue says.

“‘King Lear’” is markedly devoid of salvation,” Inoue continues. “Even in ‘Macbeth’ there is, in a sense, a passing of the baton to the next generation. But ‘King Lear’ leaves us with a much more ambiguous kind of despair,” he says, adding that this “unsettled hopelessness” is something many can relate to today, regardless of politics. Ultimately, Inoue believes what keeps the play relevant is Lear’s humanity.

“What does Lear finally see?” he asks, referencing the ambiguous ending of the play. “He may begin as the ruler of a nation, but eventually he becomes just one person. When ordinary people like us witness that transformation, how does it reflect back on our own lives?”

As with most things Lear, there are endless possibilities for interpretation.