The Great Wave rides the crest of technical achievement but fails to sustain the momentum and stick the landing
You have seen it before. Your friends and family have seen it. Everyone and their dogs have seen it. Whether in a museum, on someone’s tote bag, or on the walls of a sushi bar, The Great Wave off Kanagawa is instantly recognisable, an iconic work of art that is reproduced and plastered everywhere imaginable. And in 2026, everywhere imaginable includes on stage at a world premiere as the centrepiece of an ambitious, large-scale show.
Named after the artwork, The Great Wave is an opera about its creator, Katsushika Hokusai. A triumph of collaboration, it is composed and written by Dai Fujikura and Harry Ross respectively, and co-produced by Scottish Opera and KAJIMOTO. The Great Wave does not so much as follow his life as it gives us glimpses into it – and also to the beyond. Told in a nonlinear fashion, The Great Wave washes over you as an almost holistic experience, and it is with regret that you find yourself dry at the end of it.
With the heavyweights behind this production, it is almost guaranteed that you will be impressed by the technical expertise on display, and on display it is. Scenographer Junpei Kiz especially, tasked with reproducing Hokusai’s Wave, does a marvellous job. Faced with the double-edged sword of Wave being so etched into the audience’s mind, he nevertheless creates a masterful set-piece that both showcases the luscious Prussian blues and gives full force to the unstoppable waves, and also allows it to be easily adaptable, later doubling as a bamboo mat for one of Hokusai’s public art performances in a scene in Act II. Alongside this is the strong lighting design by Yuka Hisamatsu, with spotlights and shadows effectively deployed to create and manipulate distance, both physical and spiritual.
Hokusai in The Great Wave can sometimes appear to be detached from the happenings of his world as he lives in his art. This unfortunately translates to a disconnect with the audience too. You do not feel like you can truly understand the man as the character is less a man than an ideal, as if, in this retelling, his life has not just been mythologised but he has himself become part of the mythos – he is the Great Wave. While this is, in large parts, what is intended, it leaves you feeling a little cheated when you spend a significant portion of the running time with Hokusai and are not emotionally satisfied as a result.
Played by Daisuke Ohyama with great relish in his Scottish Opera debut, Hokusai stands for what he embraces around him, from nature to public adulation to constant change. Keeping him grounded throughout is his daughter, Ōi, sensitively played by Julieth Lozano Rolong,and it is this relationship that is the thread on which loosely connected, out-of-time scenes from Hokusai’s life is tethered to. Ōi is, in her own right, also an artist, and this is the bedrock of their relationship, as they exist in the same sphere of sensitivities. However, she is also more than just an artistic companion; she is his purpose and is, in a way, his – and The Great Wave’s – saving grace. Theirs is a tender relationship wherein they are artist and artist, father and daughter.
The Great Wave played at Theatre Royal, Glasgow on 12 February with a further performance scheduled for 14 February, and will also play at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh on 19 and 21 February.