Landscape after battle

This production of Euripides’s namesake tragedy marks one of the peaks of world theater. Since its 1976 premiere, it has been seen by thousands of spectators in various countries.

The stage is completely empty and undecorated, creating an all-consuming black space. A bulky spear-armed warrior in medieval dress stands like a motionless statue deep in the center; he is a powerless protective deity. On his right, one can see a completely unexpected character: an equally frozen wheelchair-bound old man who is wearing glasses and holding a book in front of himself.

The action is built around a monolog delivered by Hecuba (played by Yasuhiro Fujimoto), the widow of the Trojan king Priam, on the day after the fall of Troy. In fact, The Trojan Women is a lament for those killed in wars as well as those who are destined to become slaves of the victors.

The latter are represented on stage by three samurai who seem to have come directly from the 18th-19th-century prints which depicted Kabuki actors. They alternate between making mischief and committing atrocities, they behave as stupid teenagers at one moment, and as cold-blooded killers at the next one. Suzuki’s theatrical style is outright unrealistic, but every gesture, every symbol in it is painfully convincing; for instance, in the scene of Hecuba’s grandson’s killing, the child is replaced by a rag doll, but when executioners tear off its hand, it seems that living flesh is suffering, because the actors’ reactions are that piercing.

Fujimoto-Hecuba performs a tremendous amount of work, not only combining expressive style of Kabuki with psychological nuances, but also reincarnating first as Cassandra, a powerless prophetess and the daughter of Hecuba, and then as a half-crazy woman who has lost everything during World War Two and now just raves. The collapse of her world is reflected in the collapse of the narrative: the old man in the background suddenly begins to read aloud, trying to regain control over the story, but instead of a coherent plot, he produces only a set of tattered phrases.

The Trojan Women ends on a deceptively frivolous note with the melodramatic love song I Want You to Love Me Tonight, and Hecuba falls unconscious, or maybe dead, to the sound of it, but it is precisely this terrible frivolity that causes the shock which Aristotle once called catharsis.

Tadashi Suzuki (born on June 20, 1939 in the city of Shimizu) is a theater director, writer, and philosopher. He has been working out of the highland village of Toga (Toyama Prefecture) for 40 years. Suzuki manages his own theater center Suzuki Toga (SCOT) and the Toga Art Park which includes six theaters, rehearsal rooms, offices, homes, and restaurants; he also serves as organizer of the first Japanese international theater festival (the Toga Festival), founding member of the International Committee of the Theater Olympics, and chairman of the board of directors for the Japan Performing Arts Foundation.

His most famous productions are The Trojan Women, Dionysus, King Lear, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Madame de Sade. Suzuki has developed his own system of teaching and training actors, which is accordingly called the Suzuki method. Actually, this method was the starting point of our conversation, which took place immediately after the premiere of The Trojan Women in Wroclaw.

So what is the essence of your method?

“One of the most important things in that kind of the training is control of the center, being able to move at the same level across this space. And like an athlete, also to have control and awareness of your breathing dynamic. And through dynamic breathing connect the body to the voice. So, those are the particular things we work on in the training that develops, grows your ability to dynamically use and control your center of gravity and your breathing. And as you work on those two things, your voice becomes force. So that even in stillness energy comes to the body.”

Do you have any special requirements for the actors?

“You need to do the training daily for about five years before you can be at this stage. It’s like classic ballet. At least three years before you can do a minor role.”

So, your actors should be a real workaholic, shouldn’t they?

“In fact, they spend a lot of time making each play. They only make one new performance every year, and only perform six different plays every year in repertories. They do the training all year long, that’s like an athlete. So, they don’t take long vacations, they continue to train throughout the year.”

As I understand it, you believe in the truth of the body, so you have the gesture in the first place, with the emotions coming second.

“Unless the body is developed, the emotion will not come. We have to have a properly trained instrument first, to make space for the emotional. If you don’t have the properly trained instrument, only weak, unclear emotions come out.”

Did you find working in Moscow hard? After all, the Stanislavski system, which is common in Russian theaters, flatly contradicts your approach, because it puts psychology in the first place, with the body coming second.

“If certain approaches to art are mutually exclusive, it is not art. We just start with training the physical instrument, body control, and leave space for the imagination, leave space for the emotional, psychological work. But the problem with the Stanislavski system is that he hasn’t created a physical component to it. It’s only the psychological and imaginational work, and that’s where Suzuki created his method, created the body work. And that’s why Meyerhold is very important in Russian history, and also Grotowski, and Brecht.”

Since you staged King Lear, and it is my favorite Shakespeare play, let me ask a somewhat childish question: what is it about, in your opinion?

“It’s main things are madness and violence. And loneliness. If you look at Macbeth, it’s the same: violence and madness leading to solitude. Lady Macbeth who is crazy, and Macbeth is alone. So, Shakespeare’s plays deal with excessive energy, way beyond the normal, and so, it is what causes murder, that’s what causes madness.”

But I think Macbeth and Lear are opposites: when Macbeth went mad, he became very cruel, and when Lear went mad, he grew more humane.

“He becomes more humane, but all the characters around him become more cruel. Regan, Goneril…”

Going back to the play you presented at the festival: what commonalities do you see between the traditional Japanese theater and the Ancient Greek drama?

“It’s the presence of the chorus, and also the use of the mask. And this idea of a hero figure coming out and transforming. And they are usually taking place within a family. The protagonist is some kind of famous hero from some dynasty. And in the Noh theater, as also in the Greek tragedy, part of the effort is to make a troubled spirit go to peace, bring him to peace.”

Is this why the ancient drama is so important to you?

“For me the Greek tragedy is the most contemporary theater. Human beings have not developed in 2,000 years, they still have the same tragedies.”

Finally, why does humankind still need theater? We have cinema, TV, the Internet, but we still need that unmediated presence of the actor.

“It’s because it’s live exchange. We have to be in the same space and have that exchange, we need it as human beings. Especially now when we don’t see the people we communicate with, it’s all through the machine. So we need it even more. That’s destroying humanity, this thing, going through machines, so we need the theater even more today.”