• Kabuki: 駄右衛門花御所異聞 (Daemon and the Flower Palace)

7/18/17 (Tues), Tokyo

This is a rarely seen drama about the real-life gangster Nippon Daemon first produced in 1761 (under the name Akiba Gongen Kaisen Banashi) and apparently drastically rewritten for Ebizo. More accurately, it has been reworked as a vanity piece for the star. A villain has stolen a precious manuscript and magical religious heirloom from a noble family in hopes of toppling it and taking over the country. The rest hardly matters. 

The show as presented here features a number of stereotypical characters thrown into an impossibly convoluted story that requires magic powers and the intervention of gods to unravel. The original play was created during a particularly fertile period for Kabuki (albeit mainly via adaptations from Bunraku puppet shows), including the three great masterpieces of the Japanese stage just a few years earlier, and while head-spinning plot developments, happenstance and such are common enough in Kabuki, the best shows take time to lay out their stories and establish believable individuals so that we care about what is happening. Here, the show seems to be rushing from one would-be highlight to the next, encompassing numerous subplots that are touched upon but hardly developed. It begs direct comparison with the classic Chushingura in one case with an intentional parallel of Enya Hangan’s famous ritual suicide scene, which doesn’t do this play any favors – didn’t they learn anything from the beautiful buildup of the earlier story? Similarly, the attempted double-suicide of the courtesan and her lover is standard Kabuki fare, but it would have been nice to see what drove them to that point rather than simply hearing about it.

This was the pattern throughout the play, with way too much exposition in the dialogue even for Kabuki and lazy fallbacks to crowd-pleasing antics like out-of-nowhere fight scenes (at least four), overheard conversations (three in a row at one point), fast role-switching for its own sake, and artificial sound and lighting effects that reminded me of Emma Rice at the Globe. Characters in dramas are only effective when they are real people rather than broad types, and it was difficult to sympathize with anyone here without knowing anything about them. The writers – and I suspect that Ebizo had a big hand in this given how much it played him up – were less concerned with real people in real situations than with excuses to throw in yet another pose or stage effect. The title role, for one, was portrayed much more convincingly in the still-popular Shiranami Gonin Otoko a century later. Here he was just a stock character.

A big exception was the middle act, where the hard-nosed proprietress of the brothel was a delightful, greedy, three-dimensional creation skillfully brought to life by Kojiro in the performance of the night. He provided the show’s best comedy as well as its most tragic moment, and was expert at both. I wish the rest of the play and performances were at that level,though Chusha was also unexpectedly good in both of his roles. The introduction of a gay lover by the proprietress’ brother, which becomes a key plot point (she lies to authorities about his identity and has him killed), avoided the usual swishiness for the most part and might have been interesting, but was not credible as presented here – for one thing, the gay relationship would never have been presented so openly. The character was basically there for the novelty rather than an organic part of the show. Which typifies the plot as a whole.

Ebizo is on cruise control for much of the night, especially in some of the less inspired fight scenes. He tends to mistake posing for acting. Much was made of his lightning shifts from character to character (he played six roles) and costume to costume, but not all was technically accomplished – someone needs to have an emperor’s-new-clothes talk with him about the early swordfight where he plays both sides at once, where the switches back and forth were far too obvious. It became tiresome after a while.

He did a very good job, however, in the dramatic scene in one of his roles where he kills his wife, the proprietress, in a tragic misunderstanding. Partly because her character was so well drawn, the scene was intense and effective (offsetting the dubious device that saw his murdered and mutilated body come back to life thanks to a magic amulet). As he weeps bitterly and cradles her dying body in his arms, it was hard not to think about the actor’s own wife, a well known TV announcer, who was lost to cancer less than a month ago. Whether or not that was a factor, it was the one time where he seemed to be feeling the lines rather than proclaiming them. That’s the Ebizo I’d like to see more of. He also performed energetically as the villain in the final showdown, though in the end it was little more than a simple stage picture.

Ebizo’s four-year son made a memorable debut. He entered from the hanamichi in a fox suit and had to walk along its full length all on its own with the audience staring at him on each side as the rest of the cast waited on stage. He was then hoisted with his father into the air, over the audience’s heads and up to the fourth floor, which could not have been easy for a kid that age (he’s the youngest to have ever performed a flying stunt). He did it all with aplomb to the delight of the audience, waving back at them as he passed by and beyond the balcony in a forgivable break from character. Stage debuts can be at any age, but I imagine they hastened it for Ebizo’s son in hopes that his mother could see him, which sadly didn’t happen.

The show offers plenty of spectacle – a boat that is rowed across stage, a collapsing temple, bursts of flames, a revolving stage, falling cherry blossoms (three times, including twice on the audience), flying gods, an exploding fountain of coins, impressive gymnastics, rapid costume and role changes, large-scale cast and sets – but not much heart to go with it. Some of the antics, like the hopping tengu demons (in terrible costumes) and eerie lighting effects during the god’s appearance, smelled of desperation. Staging effects shouldn’t be used as a substitute for plausible characters and a good story. There were some nice bits of humor, like the hamburger that pops out at one point (“I would have preferred a shrimp (ebi) burger” – a reference to Ebizo). So all was not lost. Still, while there’s no knowing the details of the original drama (Kabuki scripts from those days don’t exist), it was clearly rewritten from a 21st-century sensibility, such as the gay role and the notion that Daemon wants to take over the whole of Japan, an idea inspired more by Hollywood than Kabuki. A lazy and unsatisfactory show.