| Ryuzanji Theater in Moscow Namboku Tsuruya, who almost two hundred years ago composed the play “Crazy Love of a Samurai” for the Kabuki theater (it is performed by the Ryuzanji Theater that came to us on tour), is called by his compatriots the Japanese Shakespeare. This title reflects the strange attachment of the inhabitants of the eastern islands to analogies and duplicates: only the Japanese are capable of building an exact copy of some European castle in their country (eternal tourists with cameras also make duplicates of what they see, taking them with them). This tendency could be easily understood if Japanese culture itself had emerged recently and its historical collection was small and uninteresting. But no: culture is ancient, literature is great, but imitations cannot be avoided. Well, let's say Shakespeare. Three evenings in a row at the Theater Center on Strastnoy (today is the last evening).
That night, while the samurai protagonist was standing guard, intruders entered his master's castle and stole 100 ryo. The samurai was kicked out of service, and in order to return, he must somehow get this money. The situation is complicated by the fact that money is needed to solve a great task - revenge on another clan; therefore, returning them is a matter of honor. The samurai's vassals go looking for money, and he manages to fall in love with a geisha, who, on the orders of her husband (umm... in Russian speaking, a pimp?) deceives him and appropriates the money already collected. After which the samurai kills several employees of the cheerful house, first tries to poison his beloved (by accident her brother dies), then cuts off her head and goes to the temple, where he thoughtfully eats noodles, placing his head in front of himself (“I wanted to have dinner with you, Komen”). . Then it turns out that the geisha’s husband was collecting money for his father, who is a vassal of this same samurai and was puzzled by the search for money specifically for him. The geisha's husband decides to tell the police that it was he who killed his wife; the samurai's servant confessed to the previous murder. All this is done so that the samurai can return to the clan, participate in the attack on enemies and die with honor. Which is what ultimately happens. Phew, there are still a lot of details, I won’t tell you everything.
There are, of course, a lot of corpses on stage, but not every author who slaughtered his heroes is Shakespeare. Yes, Namboku Tsuruya wrote a play, documenting the breakdown of times - but the breakdown is more familiar, easier to describe and diagnose, than the one that troubled Shakespeare’s hero. The samurai class is still nervous, still walks with two swords, but is clearly beginning to lose power; too much now depends on people not of honor, but of the purse, described as accurately and multifacetedly as by Ostrovsky. In “Crazy Love of a Samurai,” the hero can pronounce curses on fate as much as he wants, but fate is these specific, clever people who first robbed him and then died due to a feudal duty that they are still ready to fulfill. The world is swaying, but this swaying is not of the human soul, but of the social structure.
In any case, it is a Japanese classic, staged hundreds of times, interpreted this way and that. In order to stand out from the crowd, the small (22 people) troupe, led by Shu Ryuzanji, had to come up with something special. And they gave the main male roles - the samurai Gengobei and the husband of the geisha Sangoro - to women.
Kabuki theater in the last four hundred years has been a purely male theater, where women’s roles are played by men. But he was born in cheerful neighborhoods and was then purely feminine. The government banned women from playing in the theater in 1629 due to the decline of morals (and thus provoked the emergence of an entire culture of onnagata - men playing female roles). So, the Ryuzanji Theater clearly decided to return to the origins of kabuki - and gave work to women.
Hiroko Ito, in the role of a samurai, moves her shoulders in an exaggerated manner (so that it seems that these same shoulders are of a “male” width) and generally enlarges her gestures too much - the “scene of revelry” seems to have been sketched out in gouache. But when the samurai stops having fun and begins to suffer and take revenge, the actress writes out the role as if with the finest feather. A frozen, tenacious, snake-like gaze, a deceptive, devastated calmness of posture, the efficiency of a chopping blade... and a completely cold, reasonable, attentive turn of the head towards a crying child after the murder of his mother - a second of reflection - and the audience sighed when the samurai did not went to this child behind the partition.
Keeping in mind that kabuki is a people's theater (aristocrats preferred the refined noh theater), Shu Ryuzanji creates today's "folk" spectacle. The songs are set to modern electronic melodies, a full-time comedian in a cameo role - a kind of miracle in rag ribbons - tries to communicate with the audience in Russian (a screen with subtitles helps to understand everyone else), and the characters move very freely, sometimes dancing in a completely pop style manners. Exactly until the moment when the big massacre begins. When a woman with frozen eyes fights ten men at the same time, Japan will appear to you without imitations and newfangled nonsense. The way she rarely allows herself to be seen. Anna GORDEEVA |
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