Tenacious Mishima

Yukio Mishima, a Japanese writer and playwright still unexplored by the Ukrainian theater, has now been embraced by the Ivan Franko National Theater, which includes in its repertoire a performance based on his play, Marquise de Sade. This rendition is notable for an original cast. Mishima represented the life of the renowned marquis through the eyes of the women around him. There are only six of them present in the play, and for this reason director Andriy Prykhodko staged the play in a chamber, one-act format. A basic shortcoming of Mishima’s play in terms of stage production is its verbosity: the characters mainly fall into reminiscences and discussions on the role de Sade played in their lives. The final identification with the archetypal marquis (“Alphonse is I!”) is only a cue, which does not contribute much to the action. For the sake of dramatization of such material the performers obviously endeavored to get the most out of the scenic store of visual means. The most successful part of this set should be recognized as the work of Polina Adamova, costume designer. Her costumes are a kind of personages by themselves. They override the heroines, turning them into characters, tragicomic masks. In its turn, the background corresponds to precious dresses: the white setting of the scenic construction, a kind of stage within a stage, plus sometimes unexpected contrasting backdrops. And the costumes are not all. In many episodes there is a noticeable stylization like Japan’s bunraku shadow theater, and even more the traditional Japanese theater with its interlude curtains, minimalist sound, and fixed hieroglyphic actors’ plasticity. Using such stage technique is always dangerous, since behind, say, the Kabuki theater there are generations of actors’ school, which had been polishing their parts in the smallest details of gestures and intonations for centuries. Unfortunately, in the actresses’ work such labor is invisible. The acting rapidly goes to anguish, to an unnecessary and excessive artificiality, which is most tiresome for the spectators as well as for the performers. Mishima, for our stage in particular and for the cultural interior in whole, is actually still an amazing and rare guest. His literary achievements are rather disputable and, anyway, are unequal to the plot of his life, which the writer lived, or rather performed, according to the laws of drama up to its tragic finale. Perhaps this very existential spirit could provide the solution for such a complicated task as dramatizing Mishima’s plays in a theater belonging to an absolutely different stream. All this, however, is mere assumption. Meanwhile, to all appearances, Mishima is too sophisticated for both our traditionalists and innovators.