
Photo: Tsukasa Aoki
We were looking for something to go and see during a recent visit to London, and Theatre de Complicite caught our eye. We have been big fans of Complicite and Simon McBurney ever since they visited Dundee and performed Street of Crocodiles. They don’t do many performances, but what they do is different and special.
So a play completely in Japanese seemed pretty different from your usual West End show, and we booked to see Shun-kin.
The story is based on two 1933 writings from Japanese author Jun’ichiro Tanizaki: A Portrait of Shunkin and In Praise of Shadows. Shunkin was a blind female player and teacher of a Japanese stringed instrument called the shamisen. She was stunningly beautiful. She lived with her servant Sasuke, who became her pupil and then her lover in a complicated often sado-masochistic relationship. A story then about devotion, expect, as McBurney says, in Japan it is sometimes hard to know what you are looking at.
Shunkin was a petulant child, getting her own way, but her servant Sasuke stayed loyal to her, despite her being unspeakably cruel. There were children, but these were taken away and adopted – Sasuke never saw them again. One day, a pupil deliberately burnt Shunkin’s face, causing horrible disfigurement, and Shunkin wrapped up her head in a bandage, determined that Sasuke should not see her in her ugliness. But Sasuke made a huge sacrifice so that he might stay with Shunkin, and fixed it so that he could never see her again. With a needle from the sewing room. A poor man who threw away so much to stay loyal. Why did he do that?
Perhaps a clue lies in the second text which praises the beauty of darkness and shadow. The set was very dark, with much use of candlelight, and this was a very dark haunting tale, so beautifully told by Complicite. McBurney spread the story across the generations, so at the beginning, an old man wandered onto the set with a long stick and explained all about it, and about the graves of Shunkin and Sasuke who lived in the mid 19th century. The action took place back then, but told through an actress reading the book in a Tokyo radio studio for modern-day transmission. “Mushi Mushi” she said into her mobile phone to her on/off lover between takes.
And the stagecraft from Complicite was just awesome using movement, sound and video projection seamlessly. Shunkin’s pet lark was taken out of its box – a flapping bit of paper, then a flock of flapping bits of paper by the actors, and then the video projection took over and the flapping bits of paper became birds flying up and up and across the stage. Poles became swaying branches. But the coup de theatre was that Shunkin was portrayed first as a child puppet, then an adult puppet – wonderful work by Blind Summit Theatre – but then morphing into a real actor later on – still with a puppet mask, still moved by puppeteers. The sound-scape and effects from Gareth Fry – including the now trademark Complicite effect of a soundtrack taking over from an actor speaking completely seamlessly – was a big integral part. Fry has worked on most Complicite productions, but also did the sound for Black Watch.
And as a bonus, we got a surprise appearance from McBurney himself: the play started, and the old man came in and explained in Japenese about his stick, and then introduced another man with a big book. But the promised supertitles failed to start, and the stage manager had to stop the action, and then McBurney came bouncing on to explain that we really needed them – nice to see him there.
I found the action on stage so mesmeric, that it was a struggle to look away and read the very wordy surtitles at either side of the stage. In opera, there are far fewer words, making surtitle reading much easier, but this was quite a struggle as it was so text based.
But we really enjoyed this very different evening at the theatre. Shun-kin is transfering back to Tokyo in March.