Anthony Sher hat im 'Guardian' über die Tourerlebnisse in Japan geschrieben:
Zitat:
Theatre of dreams
Cherry blossom, Kabuki, sake and shrines. All useful diversions for an actor playing drama's most jinxed role. Antony Sher takes Macbeth to Tokyo
Sat 29 Apr 2000 17.53 BST
First published on Sat 29 Apr 2000 17.53 BST
'Will the jet-lag be bad?" "We'll find out tomorrow." "It is tomorrow." "And tomorrow and tomorrow."
I'm talking to Harriet Walter on the plane to Japan. We're playing the Macbeths in the current RSC production - directed by Greg Doran (who's also my partner) - and it's doing a three-week run at Tokyo's Globe Theatre.
The jet-lag is severe, and Tokyo's no help. A city in a permanent state of rush-hour. A constant sense of crowd, of commuting, of gridlock. Traffic moves so slowly that televisions are installed on car dashboards. Cyclists have taken to the pavements, whizzing expertly through the thronging pedestrians. In the subway, the trains are frequent, fast and full. Day and night. Everyone seems exhausted. Complete strangers - suited gentlemen and bespectacled housewives - doze on one another's shoulders. Young women are slumped over, forehead to knee. Men strap-hang, asleep on their feet.
But if at first Tokyo seems like a cross between Metropolis and Blade Runner, there's another side to it, just evident in the avenues of trees: the branches still have a wintry grey look, but people say the cherry blossom might come out while we're here, and then we'll be truly blessed.
Macbeth itself needs no help, luckily - "sold out" signs are already up at The Globe. This is a rather unlovely pink concrete building in Shin-Obuko - a lively district crammed with noodle bars and mini-supermarkets - but it houses a very dynamic auditorium, not unlike the Swan in Stratford.
Tech-ing the show with the Globe staff, via interpreters, we encounter the astonishing politeness and good-humour that Westerners always note in the Japanese: people really do bow to you all the time, beaming with warmth. Two days later, we open. The atmosphere in the auditorium is electric, the audience concentrated in a way that I've seldom known before. Cynics might say it's the language barrier - simultaneous translation is available through earphones - but I suspect it's also something about Macbeth as a play.
Why did Kurosawa's film Throne of Blood serve it so well, I ask a Japanese group after the show, or Ninagawa's more recent stage version? The fall of the man of honour, someone suggests, he's a familiar figure in samurai legend. A fascination with violence - says someone else - it's the other side of the coin, the restraint and respect you visitors always admire in our personality. And it's about a strong wife, the real power behind the throne, chuckles a third; and we know this character, too.
On the first weekend, Greg and I visit Hiroshima. Arriving late Sunday night, gazing from our high-rise hotel, there's a familiar neon landscape below, but the next morning, in fresh soft sunlight, the city reveals itself to have a lovely aspect, built across the Otagawa River Delta, with woody hills in between. The buildings are all modern, of course, post 1945, post blast.
Hiroshima. The name bangs in our brains, but to the locals it's just home. This is quite hard to absorb as we drive to the Memorial Peace Park, with the taxi's radio playing the Village People hit In The Navy, in Japanese.
In the museum you see scorched pocket-watches stopped at 8.15am, and models of Hiroshima before and after that point in time - a whole city here one moment, gone the next - and a full-scale replica of the bomb itself, nicknamed Little Boy. Further in, the sights are even grimmer. The skin of a dead child's finger - peeled away like a prawn shell - kept by the mother to show the father when he returned from the war.
Elsewhere, I found myself wishing that the elegantly-lit exhibits of melted roof tiles and glass, like all the shots of mushroom clouds, weren't so bloody beautiful. No such problem in the cinema, where it's impossible to keep watching the screen. The face of one boy has bare-bone jaws, like a skull, yet he's alive. Many of the doctors tending the injured, and the cameramen recording their efforts, would later succumb to radiation sickness; they didn't yet know the danger.
Needing fresh air, we go outside. Greg breaks down. I sit numbly trying to make notes.
At the other end of the park, one building is preserved from 1945: the Industrial Promotional Hall. Like many of the things we've seen today, it has a skinned look, the brickwork showing pink and fleshy through the grey plaster. Little Boy exploded directly above this spot, right here.
We return to Tokyo in a kind of daze. Doing the show is rather dream-like tonight. Theatre seems a little irrelevant. On the other hand, being Shakespeare, some passages sound strangely apt. "Pity, like a naked new-born babe striding the blast." And I have no difficulty picturing Banquo's ghost tonight: his face has bare-bone jaws.
Mid-week we do a day-trip to Mount Takao, taking a chair-lift up the steep slopes of towering pines. After the fumes of Tokyo's eternal rush-hour, the mountain air is intoxicating, and the views vast. They'll be even more beautiful in a few days' time. Every bud on every tree is at bursting point. It's like they're awaiting some cue.
At the summit, there's a macaque monkey reserve, where you can enter the enclosure. The residents are untidily-furred, stump-tailed and red-faced, with a blushing, shifty look as they dart behind the visitors like pick-pockets. In a flash, one has got Greg's Time Out Guide to Tokyo. For a moment, the animal scans the pages at speed, as if searching for its review, and then, as I've been known to do with Time Out, attacks it with gnashing teeth. After a brief tug-of-war, an attendant returns the book to us, minus two bite-sized chunks. Fortunately, the directions are still intact to Ukai Toríyama, a renowned restaurant in the neighbouring valley.
This is a seriously traditional Japanese eating place - we're the only tourists here today - where separate dining chambers, complete with sliding doors and paper walls, are set among a mossy garden of ponds, water-mills and lacquered bridges. Kimono-clad waitresses bear course after course to your room. Much of the food is excellent, though I must confess a problem with substances that bob or slip. Japanese beer is very good, though, and on the return to Tokyo I join the ranks of slumped commuters.
For our second weekend, we board the bullet train, a sleek silver serpent with pointed head on either end, and zip across country to the ancient capital, Kyoto. It's a city of temples and shrines, yet not as serene as this sounds. No sooner have you seen one of the shrines at Kiyomizu-dera - a cluster of temples built on spectacular verandas overhanging the valley - than you find a dozen shops selling its likeness in plastic, cardboard or cake.
We proceed to Kyoto's most famous landmark, Kinkaku-ji, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. This is also the title of Mishima's acclaimed novel, based on a real-life crime here in 1950. A Zen Buddhist student, tortured by physical ugliness and a stammer, became obsessed with the beauty of the 500-year-old, gold-plated temple, poised above its own exquisite reflection in the Mirror Pond, and burned it down. The present building is an exact reconstruction. Fabulous black and gold carp rise from the shallows of the pond, mouths agape, begging from the tourists as shamelessly as the Swans of Avon.
Sanjusangen-do Temple is my favourite: a huge, dark hall holding 1,001 gilded statues of Kannon, the deity of mercy. The thousand are life-sized, ranked like an army, and the one is a seated, multi-limbed giant. Mercy might be the theme, but there's also something fantastically brutal here. Gods of thunder and wind snarl at you - wooden figures with crystal eyes, their look both furious and tearful - wrestlers grimace, musicians thrum their drumskins. I reel back into the sunlight.
We strike lucky again at Nijo Castle, a magnificent shogun palace. Colossal wooden gates and mossy stone walls outside, shadowy corridors within, the rooms decorated with beautifully simple murals of pine and blossom.
Most fascinating are the "nightingale floors" whose boards warble as you walk. These weren't built for the magic they put into the atmosphere - it's just a 17th-century security device.
During our last week in Tokyo, we attend a matinee performance at the Kabuki Theatre in Ginza. I'm expecting this to be a chore, done in the line of duty, but it's mesmeric. Here is theatre preserved in aspic from 400 years ago, Shakespeare's time. Yet, whereas western classical theatre eschews the art of copying (I don't seek to play Richard III like Olivier, or Macbeth like McKellen), Kabuki cherishes it. Gesture by gesture has been handed down by generations of actors. Especially compelling is the behaviour of the onnagata , the female impersonators. In the one-act play, Shunkan, the fisher-girl is played by Fukusuke with a simpering falsetto, quivery butterfly gestures and a strange sideways totter, which causes her to fall over in any crisis.
The performances are all stylised, presented rather than inhabited. In contrast, kneeling to the side of the exceptionally wide stage, the narrator, a sturdy, square-headed man, now growling, now wailing, bears a more passionate, almost enraged relationship to the story. The audience calls out excitedly as a new figure appears on the hanamichi - a ramp through the auditorium - wearing a long-sleeved pink kimono and mask-like white make-up. This is the superstar onnagata , Tamasaburo, who played a notable Lady Macbeth in his youth. Unlike Fukusuke's fragile, fluttery portrait of womankind, Tamasaburo's is altogether more stately and glacial; he slowly performs the elongated steps and held poses of the Cherry Blossom Dance.
Outside, the real thing has suddenly bloomed in a spell of warm weather. A whitish pink, or geisha pink, the blossom transforms Tokyo's garish cityscape. On overcast days, the canopies of flowers create their own curious radiance, immensely soft. When there's sunshine, they leap to the eye with an altogether sharper, crystalline clarity. This is deceptive. Touch an individual blossom and its petals instantly break away, taking to the breeze. The spring air is alight with swirls of pinkish snow, the streets lined with it, too. One storm could decimate this spectacle. It's why it's so prized, why the cherry blossom became the symbol of samurai warriors: you fall at the height of your perfection - no withering, no "sere and yellow leaf", as Macbeth puts it.
So now it's Hanami, cherry blossom time. You expect westerners to be amazed by it, but what's more surprising, and wonderful, is how the locals walk about with their heads back, grinning as though they'd never seen the like before, and lift infants up to the branches.
In Ueno Park, the avenues throng with people. Each tree is staked out with a blue tarpaulin underneath, and a lone figure in a sleeping-bag. These are junior office workers, guarding the spot till the others can join. After our last show on Saturday night, and after fulsome and moving farewells at the Globe, Greg and I hurry back to the park.
Drink is an essential part of Hanami and the place is crazy with it now. Arriving sober, the impression is of boarding a ship that seems steady under your feet while tossing everyone else about. The park lanterns have been switched off to encourage the crowds to leave, but the semi-darkness is still clamorous with hoarse laughter and song, sexual moans, and the occasional smashing glass. Mountains of litter are stacked everywhere, and teams of paramedics are charging around with wheeled stretchers.
We've brought along a little bottle of sake and a sushi lunch-tray, but this party ain't for us. We turn and flee.
To understand the Japanese, someone told us, you have to think of them more as a tribe than the citizens of a country; they are, after all, 97% racially intact, which can't be true of many modern societies. Hanami is a good illustration. It's not a street party, not a question of people over-indulging; it's a festival of Nature. The cherry blossom comes suddenly and is over in a few days. While here, it's to be worshipped - intensely, wildly, without inhibition.
Back in the safety of our 14th-floor hotel room, we laugh at our own cowardice, our alien-ness here, then open our sake and toast the extraordinary rite of spring going on in Tokyo city tonight.
Antony Sher is appearing in the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth at the Young Vic until June 3.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2000/apr/29/japan