Shakespeare Bulletin

Despite the 2016 passing of the revered director Yukio Ninagawa, one of the great Shakespeareans of modern times, Shakespeare's popularity in Japan shows no sign of flagging. During my visit in August 2019, the Kakushinhan company in Tokyo was staging the entire first Henriad (reviewed by Kitamura Sae in this issue) and productions of Hamletand Henry VIIIwere in rehearsal, while an acclaimed Japanese version of Othello(in which the protagonist belongs to the indigenous Ainu minority) was en route to London. As You Like Itwas staged at the prestigious Tokyo Metropolitan Theater, and the presence of several celebrity actors in the cast ensured that tickets had sold out quickly. As the production was also the first stab at Shakespeare by a young director, Kumabayashi Hirotaka, I was eager to see how the upcoming generation would push Japanese Shakespeare in new directions in the post-Ninagawa era.

The program notes promised that Arden would be a land of uninhibited eros, and the performance more than lived up to that billing. Indeed, this was among the most outrageously licentious Shakespeare productions I have ever seen. It almost certainly set the record, if such statistics were kept, for simulated sex acts in a Shakespeare performance in Japan—and indeed perhaps anywhere else in the world. To be fair, the language barrier was likely a contributing factor. Shakespeare's lascivious puns present a challenge in non-English performance as so many of them can be lost in translation. According to the director's notes in the program, Kumabayashi sought to overcome this hurdle by having the cast comb through the playscript with the aid of Frankie Rubinstein's A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significanceso as to bring out every conceivable bawdy innuendo—whether or not, it must be said, they were warranted by the context. For instance, when Phoebe jokingly pretends that her eye (Japanese nouns don't distinguish between singular and plural) could kill, the actress spread her legs and pointed to her vagina. This was not a recipe for subtle or highbrow Shakespeare, [End Page 133]but it did shine a glaring spotlight on the play's exploration of sexuality, especially same-sex desire.

The homoerotic overtones were conspicuous as early as the wrestling match in act one. Charles was not beefy and slow-witted, but roughly the same size as Orlando, and the optics of the two of them slamming their shirtless bodies into each other—while Touchstone sat in the audience munching on popcorn—looked less like a sumo match (as in Branagh's Japanese-inspired film adaptation) than two young men engaged in some rough trade. To win the bout, Orlando chomped Charles in the scrotum and then, after a prolonged and violently passionate kiss, bit off his tongue.

The sexuality only intensified when the play transitioned to Arden. At the start of act two, an enormous heap of clothing dropped from the ceiling, and the actors playing Duke Frederick and his courtiers, previously dressed in solemn black, retrieved colorful outfits (such as Hawaiian shirts and fuchsia boas), quickly changing onstage into Duke Senior and his co-mates in exile. The clothing lay scattered upstage for the duration of the play, like the contents of an overturned wardrobe department, adding to the impression produced by the behavior of the Duke's men that Arden was not a lush greenwood but rather a derelict theater used as a rendezvous for homosexual trysts. In the Duke's famed pastoral monologue, the "pinching" of the winter's wind provoked playful sexual pinches between the Duke and his young minions, who proceeded to bump and grind in a threesome, while the finding of "tongues" in...