The beggar's theatre
Prostitutes, samurai, feudal rivalries ... the history of kabuki is one of the most colourful in drama. By Simon Callow
Wednesday June 29, 2005
The Guardian
There is something peculiarly intriguing about performing traditions that are radically unlike our own. They imply whole worlds of difference: physical, emotional, mental, philosophical. The Japanese theatre is especially remote, its three great forms - the puppet theatre (bunraku), the tragic drama (noh), and the melodrama (kabuki) - making a powerful but deeply puzzling impression. Kabuki, although the most popular of the three, and a reasonably regular visitor to British stages, remains exotically elusive. One admires, one is fascinated, but one doesn't quite connect.
It is therefore exhilarating to be given, in Kabuki Heroes, a new exhibition at the British Museum, an entrée into the world of kabuki which, while scarcely normalising it, illuminates one of its aspects in such brilliant detail that the whole phenomenon is suddenly clarified.
Kabuki as we see it today - in, for example, Shunkan or The Scene on Devil's Island, one of the greatest in the repertoire - is action-packed, scenically thrilling and histrionically flamboyant. The story concerns Shunkan, a monk exiled to the eponymous island; he and his fellow exiles receive a reprieve at the hands of imperial envoys, but one of them is heartbroken that his mistress, acquired on the island, cannot come with him. Shunkan kills one of the recalcitrant envoys, insisting that she take his place on the boat. At the end of the piece, he stands on a high rock watching them return to civilisation.
Shunkan is highly stylised. The protagonists, including, famously, women played by men (the onnagata), are heavily and dramatically made up; they frequently fall into poses in which they are literally, physically, shaken by high emotion, which provokes cries of admiration and bursts of intensive applause - "stormy clapping" - from an informed audience. A singing narrator relates the story; music, much of it percussive, rhythmic and harsh, fiercely punctuates the action. For a western audience, the experience sits somewhere between opera, pantomime and silent movies, containing a great deal of the poetry, the mystery and the broad comedy of the last, as well as the musical exhilaration of the first; its scenic excitement recalls pantomime, with brilliant visual coups.
At the centre are the actors, with their brilliantly developed vocal and physical callisthenics; their movements are highly controlled, both in general and in the frequent dance sequences. One watches spellbound. Inevitably, however, for all its theatrical brilliance, the experience seems remote. It is difficult to grasp the impulses that gave rise to it. What Kabuki Heroes so vividly reveals is an art form that grew out of the most vibrant theatrical culture imaginable, driven forward by a group of powerful and ambitious personalities.
Kabuki's origins, around 1600, were distinctly louche. According to legend, Okuni, a temple dancer first plying her craft on the dry bed of Kyoto's River Kamo, created an all-female dancing troupe in which the girls, it seems, were no better than they ought to be; erotic arousal was the evening's purpose, and the girls used the shows to advertise the skills they would later deploy with their all-male clientele. From the beginning, the association between this form of theatre and brothels was strongly marked: "two sides", as the authorities proclaimed, "of the roll of a dice", both part of the "floating world" of pleasurable diversion.
In the performances, which acquired the defamatory name kabuki, meaning "bent", some of the dancers would play men; in a typical scene, an actress would impersonate a samurai visiting his mistress. This was powerfully stimulating to the male imagination, and when the company toured, they created mayhem among the provincial clientele, who as often as not would end the evening by tearing the place apart.
In 1629, the severe ruling shogunate, based in Edo (Tokyo), put an end to this so-called Prostitute Kabuki; the vacuum was swiftly filled by the creation of a Youth Kabuki, performed by boy actors, who quickly proved quite as erotically provocative and purchasable as their disgraced sisters. Anxious that the homosexuality rife in the samurai and priestly classes might spread to the population at large, the shogun moved, in the early 1650s, to ban performances. Only now did kabuki as we know it arise, with young men in the troupe obliged to shave their heads - signalling they were men, no longer boys - and all women's roles played by actors.
Within an amazingly short time, the theatrical form created by political intervention began to mature into a great art. The repressive shoguns had, from 1630, cut off Japan from the outside world; enforcing feudal structures, they also brought peace after a long period of civil war, and the population was released to pursue cultivated activities, which quickly became an obsession of the mercantile middle classes. Denied exposure to the outside world, rivalry between the three great cities - Edo, the seat of government, Kyoto, the seat of the politically emasculated but still influential Mikado, and Osaka, a busy merchant city - was the motor of development, not least in theatre.
Essentially divided on an east/west axis, Edo, that tough, new city, swarming with low-level samurai, bred a rough, flamboyant style of playing called aragoto. In Edo plays, the hero encountered villains and supernatural forces; the actors were encouraged to create formal, statue-like poses. A great practitioner arose to bring this style to perfection; his name was Danjuro, one of the great trinity of early kabuki actors.
In the western cities of Kyoto and Osaka - referred to collectively as Kami-gata, the upper region, the emperor's space - much more complex plots were developed, often taken from the bunraku theatre, engendering the wagoto style, gentle and life-like. There was great emphasis on the role of the male lover; emotion was passionate, realistic, often humorously depicted. Love-suicide plays were the core of repertory, though as befits a merchant city, Osaka tended to favour themes of love and money. This style of play, called sewamono, was perfected by Osaka's great actor Sakata Tojuro, a racy and rakish figure, who nevertheless, as actor-manager, paid close attention to detail, constantly urging observation on his colleagues.
This first full flowering of kabuki was during the Genroku period, 1688-1720; at the same time the great poet Basho and the novelist Saikaku were at work. This period produced The Actors' Analects, a comprehensive and highly practical guide to the art, including such useful tips as how to stop boyfriends from squabbling during rehearsals. The greatest of onnagatas, Ayame, offers the sage advice that: "When playing against an actor of little skill, the true artist's aim should be to make his companion's deficiencies appear as qualities."
By now, and increasingly through the 18th century, actors - though officially denoted hinin, or non-persons, outside the class system of samurai, farmer, artisan, merchant, and referred to, with a contemptuous glance at kabuki's origins, as dry-riverbed beggars - were becoming idolised by fan clubs, and were the centre of a vast amount of attention, especially in the form of prints. The British Museum exhibition focuses on the rivalry, partly engineered but at heart real enough, between actors known as Rikan and Shikan (although in the bewildering world of Japanese thespian nomenclature, they had at least three other names), who embodied opposite principles of acting.
Rikan, severe, with downturned lip and fine profile, was what in another world was called an acteur noble: he confined himself to playing one sort of part. His rival Shikan, however, sang, danced and gloried in playing every conceivable role: he was the Bottom of Japanese acting. One of his climactic impersonations had him playing both a man and a woman, with a female mask on the back of his head. This sort of thing, said Rikan, very publicly, brought the whole art of acting into disrepute. Their fans took up cudgels on either side, though the deepest desire was for the rivals to appear together. As they were about to do so, Rikan died; Shikan continued to the day he died.
It is a vivid story, which wonderfully humanises the kabuki theatre. But its abiding glory is the outpouring of full-colour wood-block prints, commissioned and in some cases executed by their fans, which record their performances, their personalities, their world. The sheer beauty of much of this material, along with the scrapbooks and the fanzines, immortalises the fans as much as the actors, offering an illuminating model of the modern cult of celebrity, where the ostensible object of adoration or fascination is merely a pretext for the creativity and projection of the fan. At many levels, Kabuki Heroes is a sensational event.
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· Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage is at the British Museum, London WC1, from tomorrow until September 11. Details: 020-7323 8000.
