Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin
****
Sombre themes permeate this music-theatre piece from the Japanese theatre company, chelfitsch. Staged and performed with simplicity and delicacy, using specially composed music and slow, limpid choreography drawn from the Noh tradition, it creates the sense of an ethereal state, between waking and sleeping. Written and directed by the company's artistic director and founder, Toshiki Okada, the work unfolds in six phases, balancing an expression of abstract ideas with details of one family's experience.
In the Japan of the not too distant future, five characters inhabit a zone between the living and dead: the living are young, inward-looking and apathetic, and are haunted by the dead, with whom they seem to negotiate, in dreams and in life. “The dead have the right to resist oblivion,” one character asserts, and, throughout, the spirit of a dead mother is onstage, shadowing her two sons and her pregnant daughter-in-law. The sons move unsteadily across the bare wooden stage, heads down, arms dangling, with the youngest son being physically drawn downwards to the earth. He communes with his dead mother’s grave, a light-filled disk, embedded in the floor. Later we learn that she took her own life, and that her eldest son is troubled by his inability to help her in her despair. Another character has withdrawn from the world, bunkered underground.
The causes of their desperation, and of so much grieving and guilt towards the dead are not spelled out, although the musical score hints at the sounds of an earthquake or other un-named catastrophes. The malaise here seems both personal, societal and specifically national: Japan is in danger of a war with China, or possibly an invasion, while Japanese has become a minority language, forced into retreat by the global reach of English. A sequence involving unsynchronised English sur-titles and a hyperactive character who refuses to learn English and thinks that she has become meaningless, deftly captures this linguistic anxiety.
The pregnant woman is determined to leave the country and raise her child in a new world, away from the ghosts. The eldest son wants to fight and possibly die to save Japan. Choices seem stark, between fervent nationalism and indifference, linguistic isolation or exile. The beauty of this production is that it leaves all of these possibilities suspended; the audience may interpret them differently or write a completely new version of the future, based on other choices. Thought provoking, unsettling and determinedly enigmatic, this work is both haunted and haunting.
Ends Sunday