New Plays: Japan leaves you seeing the world through fresh eyes, in a masterclass of new playwriting.

This exciting series of new plays at the Royal Court showcases some of the most talented and innovative voices of emerging Japanese writers. Staged in translation as script-in-hand performances, the plays are the outcome of a three year long collaborative project and intensive writing workshops between London’s Royal Court theatre and the New International Theatre Tokyo. 

In an interview with Alice Saville, Eriko Ogawa, Artistic Director of the New National Theatre Tokyo remarks that the scripts from these young playwrights present Japanese culture from a fresh perspective. Artistic funding in Japan is rarely given to emerging writers, with regular international productions and traditional forms of Japanese theatre having more established platforms; this collaboration makes for some truly groundbreaking work. Ogawa notes that in addition, a lack of formal playwriting training avenues in Japan allows for great imaginative leaps in the scripts, with concrete, natural scenarios quickly giving way to highly surreal or abstract forms.

This phenomenon is evident in the two plays performed on the opening night, with Saori Chiba’s Onigoro and Shoko Matsumara’s 28 hours 01 minute demonstrating a flair for depicting both the realistic, mundane minutiae of everyday exchanges between coworkers and neighbours, and the fantastical, often horrifying worlds into which they are plunged. Established social relationships are stretched to their limits as characters navigate these uneasy dreamscapes, and familiar encounters are examined through the lenses of the mystical and the absurd, with invigorating results.

The rich, complex worldbuilding of Onigoro, described as a ‘supernatural folk horror’, situates the ancient world of Japanese legend and mythology in the heart of contemporary Fukushima, seven years after the nuclear disaster. Two contamination workers find themselves descending into a living nightmare deep in the region’s mountains, subject to the vengeance of angered gods, animal spirits, and the earth itself. ‘Why are people so scared of ghosts?’ one of the workers asks towards the start of the play; ‘human beings are much scarier’. Onigoro investigates the effect of human evil in the twenty-first century, compounded by capitalist greed and the capabilities of modern technology, through the perspective of the natural and otherworldly entities that have been around long before us, according to Japanese folklore. It is fascinating to witness the merging of familiar, modern horror tropes, such as the creepily giggling little girls in the woods, with deeper, older narratives of gods and spirits, and finally that most urgent evil, the self-inflicted destruction of our planet. 

Matsumara’s 28 hours 01 minute presents some extraordinary writing, alternately hilarious, unsettling, and downright bizarre. The play analyses beliefs surrounding gender roles throughout Japanese culture and the conflicting desires of an expectant mother in the present day, whose values align with feminist ideology, but feels she doesn’t ‘have the power to fight any more’. When her simpering, condescending neighbour Uso (the formidably talented Kanako Nakano) brings her a tangerine, a strange, echoing series of increasingly surreal events unravels like the repeating layers of a bad dream. Again, metatextual inferences are wide-ranging: the expectant mother’s grotesque fears that the bloody foetus may burst out of her stomach reminiscent of the childbirth anxieties of Alien; the kafkaesque, russian-doll-like enclosing of scene after similar but twisted scene, with her husband eventually emerging in a rubber horse head mask; and a humorous bemoaning of the influence of the Edo Geishas on contemporary expectations of womanhood. 

A theme the two plays have in common is a kind of gluttonous overconsumption, with one contamination worker gorging on sashimi prepared by his supernatural hosts sparking his transformation into a pheasant, and the fanatic gobbling of tangerines by the horse-husband and expectant mother. The eating of certain foods as a point of transition into other realms and states of being, and the exploration and punishment of human insatiability are long-established tropes in mythology from around the world, which are welcome in such unconventional and politically exciting contexts.