In the West, it is becoming worryingly common for men - normally wealthy - to marry girls young enough to be their granddaughters, but even so, it comes as a shock to find an actor playing a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Celebrated Kabuki performer, Nakamura Ganjiro III, has acted the role of courtesan Ohatsu more than 1,000 times, and at the age of 67, he is showing no signs of losing the grace or pathos necessary to capture the essence of the 19-year-old.
For first-time Kabuki theatregoers, like this reviewer, the experience is at first, inevitably, like gazing into a beautiful picture book depicting an unrecognisable world.
Charmed but alienated, you become gradually aware of a strong vein of ironic humour, which flows into the full-blooded characterisation of comic and tragic individuals who easily cross cultural boundaries.
The all-male ensemble, which hands down its training from generation to generation, begins the evening with a short comedy as an appetiser. A lord and his servant go to the shrine of the god of good fortune to pray for a wife, but while one receives a beauty, the other is landed with a dominating crone. Ganjiro sticks to his own sex for this piece of entertainment: and as the servant, sends every action up with comic expressions of drunkenness and rebelliousness. The ritualised alternative visual language of Kabuki begins to be revealed. When the characters sleep, they kneel upright, when they go on a journey, they walk in a circle.
But it is in the second play, a famous suicide drama written in the 18th century by Chikamatsu Monzaemon - who has the dramatic stature of Shakespeare in Japan - that the most universal feature of this acting becomes clear. As the young courtesan, Ganjiro plays his voice like an instrument: sometimes an articulated wail, sometimes a seductive murmur, and you feel you would know exactly what he or any other character werefeeling, even without the well-balanced translation and commentary.
This is a fascinating glance at Japanese culture. Even though one visit merely skims the surface of a deep and complex tradition, the overall sense is of passion, humour, and accessibility.
Sonesaki Shinju (Love Suicides At Sonesaki)
