Another thing was the appearance of Beckett. It was a time when people were beginning to see the limits of “realism theater,” especially the kind of social realism that we were doing. In other words, I was tired of the kind of theater that was bound by a political agenda and only had social revolution as its end game. I wanted to find some way out of that suffocating condition. It was just at that time that Beckett appeared. Personally I had been absorbed in Kafka prior to that, so for me it was a case of moving from Kafka to Beckett as my influence. It was as if I had discovered a sense of liberation in the realization that rather than the social-political agenda we had been bound to until then, theater could be based on the internal dramas of the individual like Beckett’s plays.
It was also very stimulating to see the way that Beckett would stage his works in a space that might be defined by a single tree on an otherwise bare stage. The norm in theater at the time was to have the three sides of the stage walled with panels to create a set that could be called a type of institutionalized space and then characters who were defined and restricted by that environment (system, institution) would appear. So, the kind of “naked space” where no set is created and a poor-looking “raw character” about whom we know nothing comes out on stage and the play begins from there, that kind of “Beckett space”—that is what I came to call it—was very attractive to us, and I believe that Juro Kara and Makoto Sato and the others at the time were all influenced in some way by it.
Besides this “Beckett space,” wasn’t the dramaturgy of “theater of the absurd” as exemplified by Waiting for Godot also a shocking development for you?
It wasn’t such a big shock in terms of dramaturgy. In Europe’s Modern era, efforts to eliminate things that might be considered the absurd were one of the clear directions, so the appearance of a dramaturgy such as theater of the absurd must have been shocking. But Japan had not reached such a level of Modernization and on the individual level Western style individuality had not really been established either. Furthermore, I don’t believe that the idea of the absurd was really that new in the East. I think you could say that due to the long-standing Eastern concepts of the human being as an unfathomable entity, the acceptance of the transience of all things and the protean natural of the world, there was already a natural understanding of a sense of the absurd.
This is probably a naïve question, but I would like to ask you if you believe there is an experience that the medium of theater can bring to people which cannot be experienced through other media like movies or television or music.
Yes, there is. I think that theater is probably the only mechanism by which life-sized people can confront life-sized people with drama in practical and effective context. I feel that, in the end, the old, inconvenient nature of theater as a moment shared by only a small number of people in a closed-off environment is actually a fortunate limitation. In this age of globalism where something spoken in Japanese is immediately translated into English and things that can be understood anywhere proliferate in borderless media, I think you can even go so far as to say that culture itself becomes a product for consumption. In an age where culture is accumulated and recorded as material for reproduction and replaying, I have the feeling that the closed environment of theater can in fact be an important foothold and source of inspiration for the creative process.
I speak in terms of nikusei (the live voice) and I say that I believe the live voice is disappearing from the world at large. The live voice retains that portion of communication that is lost when a voice is codified [in the process of being recorded or transcribed]. It is like the difference between Western medicines and Chinese herbal medicines. Instead of extracting only the necessary active ingredient, the unnecessary parts are also used in their raw, un-extracted form. Although we may not know how those unnecessary parts function, we find that the herbal medicine may have less side-effects or be easier on the body and the person. In other words there may be something important in the traditional form that has been verified by tradition. I definitely believe that theater is a tradition what contains such inexplicable elements, and it is those elements that haven’t been extracted out or abstracted that are important.
Minoru Betsuyaku
It was also very stimulating to see the way that Beckett would stage his works in a space that might be defined by a single tree on an otherwise bare stage. The norm in theater at the time was to have the three sides of the stage walled with panels to create a set that could be called a type of institutionalized space and then characters who were defined and restricted by that environment (system, institution) would appear. So, the kind of “naked space” where no set is created and a poor-looking “raw character” about whom we know nothing comes out on stage and the play begins from there, that kind of “Beckett space”—that is what I came to call it—was very attractive to us, and I believe that Juro Kara and Makoto Sato and the others at the time were all influenced in some way by it.
Besides this “Beckett space,” wasn’t the dramaturgy of “theater of the absurd” as exemplified by Waiting for Godot also a shocking development for you?
It wasn’t such a big shock in terms of dramaturgy. In Europe’s Modern era, efforts to eliminate things that might be considered the absurd were one of the clear directions, so the appearance of a dramaturgy such as theater of the absurd must have been shocking. But Japan had not reached such a level of Modernization and on the individual level Western style individuality had not really been established either. Furthermore, I don’t believe that the idea of the absurd was really that new in the East. I think you could say that due to the long-standing Eastern concepts of the human being as an unfathomable entity, the acceptance of the transience of all things and the protean natural of the world, there was already a natural understanding of a sense of the absurd.
This is probably a naïve question, but I would like to ask you if you believe there is an experience that the medium of theater can bring to people which cannot be experienced through other media like movies or television or music.
Yes, there is. I think that theater is probably the only mechanism by which life-sized people can confront life-sized people with drama in practical and effective context. I feel that, in the end, the old, inconvenient nature of theater as a moment shared by only a small number of people in a closed-off environment is actually a fortunate limitation. In this age of globalism where something spoken in Japanese is immediately translated into English and things that can be understood anywhere proliferate in borderless media, I think you can even go so far as to say that culture itself becomes a product for consumption. In an age where culture is accumulated and recorded as material for reproduction and replaying, I have the feeling that the closed environment of theater can in fact be an important foothold and source of inspiration for the creative process.
I speak in terms of nikusei (the live voice) and I say that I believe the live voice is disappearing from the world at large. The live voice retains that portion of communication that is lost when a voice is codified [in the process of being recorded or transcribed]. It is like the difference between Western medicines and Chinese herbal medicines. Instead of extracting only the necessary active ingredient, the unnecessary parts are also used in their raw, un-extracted form. Although we may not know how those unnecessary parts function, we find that the herbal medicine may have less side-effects or be easier on the body and the person. In other words there may be something important in the traditional form that has been verified by tradition. I definitely believe that theater is a tradition what contains such inexplicable elements, and it is those elements that haven’t been extracted out or abstracted that are important.
Minoru Betsuyaku
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