Noh fun
Lloyd Evans
Kagyu (The Snail); Sumidagawa (The Madwoman at the Sumida River) The Hub Blackbird King’s Theatre At last I know what the fuss is about. The Noh play, that much-revered and much-avoided Japanese art form, has arrived in Edinburgh under the aegis of Nohgaku Kyokai, the world’s leading preservers of the ancient tradition. Let me give you a whiff of what they’re embalming. The first play is a light-hearted curtain-raiser. A servant is ordered to bring snails for his master. Ignorant of what snails look like, and armed with ambiguous instructions, he heads for the hills where he mistakenly captures a mountain priest. The priest plays along with the gag and allows himself to be presented to the master. They do a little dance, during which the priest bewitches both master and servant before effecting his escape. Hilarious? Certainly, if you’re steeped in the culture of feudal Japan. Then again you might call it a flimsy and inconclusive kiddies’ fairytale.
The second play, which is far longer than the first but lacks its narrative complexity, opens with a mother at a river bend singing a lament for her lost son. A ferryman also sings a lament. This takes an hour. The ferryman sings another lament. The mother responds. Then the ferryman produces a boy-child from inside a hooded tent where he’s been visibly fidgeting since the start of the play. The child sings a lament. The mother responds. The child retreats to his wigwam. Silence falls. The players depart, the lights remain up, and the audience is left in a state of dumb confusion, anxious to applaud but slightly concerned that clapping might be booing in Japanese.
A Noh play offers plenty to marvel at but little to enjoy. European voice coaches would be fascinated to see the techniques of the Japanese players, whose guttural register is a sort of heightened growling, more intense than speech but just short of recitative or chant. The actors aim for clarity and volume above texture or sweetness, and they are capable of veering up and down a whole octave in the space of four or five syllables. It’s impressive, laborious and rather painful on the senses. As for the musical accompaniment, it barely deserved the name music. A stray vocalist howled incessantly while a bloke on the flute played hectic banshee screels. Two bongoists thwacked randomly at hardwood drums and a chorus of cross-legged tenors honked out a cantata of synchronised death rattles. I had thought that Noh plays sprang from a sophisticated artistic culture. Stone-age cavemen would have covered up their ears.
But the stiff beautiful pageantry of the Noh tradition has won numerous admirers in the West. I can’t think why. Our theatre is infinitely more varied, imaginative, lucid and fluid than these frozen and simplistic austerities. And because our theatrical sensibility is much more advanced than that of 14th-century Japan, it’s hard to enjoy a Noh play without adopting a false attitude. You have to force your brain to recede into a state of naive and puerile wonderment while at the same time intensifying your openness to new aesthetic impressions. My bonce simply refused to do it. Nor was I helped by the baffling absence of English surtitles from the show. Surely the producers didn’t imagine that the whole of Edinburgh is fluent in mediaeval Japanese. This insane discourtesy made the evening about as much fun as a donkey’s funeral — which was more than just a shame; it bordered on larceny. The citizens of Edinburgh turned up in droves to this première, only to find their appetite for fresh cultural experiences matched by a production that took their custom for granted and seemed mischievously bent on testing their endurance to destruction.
David Harrower’s new play, Blackbird (no idea why he called it that), is about a ravished prepubescent. It sounds callous to say so, but child rape is the magnolia of modern playwriting — an orthodox background colour that helps you sell your wares. Typically, the entertainment involves a violated girl, now grown-up, who surprises her abuser and demands redress. The female victim usually lurches between vengeful rage and besotted flirtatiousness, while the man is troubled by reawakened desire. Both are portrayed as the helpless puppets of their libido. This is the pattern Harrower’s play follows exactly. Roger Allam and Jodhi May are strenuously efficient at the shrieking and the name-calling and their improbable lust culminates in a crinkly copulation amid the crisp bags of an unswept factory canteen. At this point Harrower loses interest in his characters and, conveniently, the designer takes up the baton. The last scene is a bravura display of visual acrobatics. The dreary factory is transformed by a dazzling orchestration of intersecting flats into a vast underground carpark. It’s astonishingly brilliant and artistically senseless because the characters have already spent their dramatic power. In the atmospheric neon gloom they thrash meaninglessly on the concrete floor, headbutting each other, grappling suggestively, panting and gasping until they finally lie still. Why? Are they dead, unconscious or just fed up? If I knew, I’d tell you. One thing’s for sure, the writer hadn’t a clue.
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