Two years after their first
collaboration at this address,
The
Bee, Colin Teevan and Hideki Noda attempt a more fundamental
fusion of eastern and western theatrical aesthetics. Teevan’s rhyming
script weaves together
The Tale Of
Genji (exactly 1000 years old and regarded by some as the first
true novel in the world) and associated Noh dramas with a contemporary
Japanese murder case. A woman accused of an arson which killed the two
children of her boss/lover takes refuge in multiple personalities from
old tales. As a state prosecutor and an impatient Gene Hunt of a police
inspector itch to get her to the gallows, a psychiatrist tries to
unlock her “true” self by navigating through her other personae’s
accounts of courtly and not so courtly love (and at one over-indulgent
point, a TV dating game show). The title refers to the first of the
woman’s alternate personalities, that of a pearl diver, as well as to
the psychiatric process and even to the amniotic ocean cradling the
unborn.
Director Noda (who also plays the psychiatrist) elicits fluid
transitions between naturalistic and Noh-stylised sequences. Lanky
Harry Gostelow looks a bit daft doing the traditional Noh
forward-moonwalk, but that is one moment in 80 minutes of delicacy
during which no movement for minutes at a time seems ever definitively
to begin or end; the action simply flows around the couch which is the
only major feature of Catherine Chapman’s set design. In a nod to
conventional Noh codes of gesture, versatile use is made of fans: they
become everything from mobile phones, by way of pizza slices, to
gynaecological instruments. And the multiple transitions between the
accused Yumi, the pearl diver, the young woman who became the mistress
of the emperor’s son Genji and others are made to seem
characteristically effortless by Kathryn Hunter. We half-register not
just the major parallel between the spurned imperial concubine and the
contemporary accused woman, but also phone calls taken by the
prosecutor which obliquely suggest that he is himself in the same
position as Genji (both played by Gostelow). The junction of criminal
psychology and private mythology has to an extent been dramatically
hackneyed for us ever since Peter Shaffer’s
Equus+ what keeps
The Diver from sinking is the
sustaining blend of air in its lungs.
Written for the Financial
Times.