• フォーチュン (Fortune)

1/23/20 (Thurs), Tokyo

World premiere of a new takeoff on the Faust legend by UK playwright Simon Stephens. It’s interesting that Stephens chose to debut his play in a foreign language before staging it in English, but his Curious Incident was a revelation in its Japanese production, which may have helped. 

The superb star of that show, Morita Go (moonlighting from his work in the boy band V6), here plays a successful movie producer named Fortune who, as the name implies, seems to have it all. However, he is in fact haunted by his father’s suicide and depressed that the woman he desires (Yoshioka Riho) is already married, and turns to heavy drugs to solve his problems. His apparent salvation appears in the form of a sultry blonde devil (Tabata Tomoko) named Lucy (Lucifer — get it?), who offers to help him for 12 years – allowing him to live a year longer than his father – in exchange for his soul. The question initially seemed to be whether this devil is the real thing or a product of Fortune’s fevered imagination. She appears to be a hostess in a decadent German-inspired cabaret – but is she? He gets the girl (briefly) after her husband meets a horrible accident due to the devil’s accordance with his wishes – or is it? He has a reunion with his late father – or does he? The story seemed to be unfolding as a kind of mind game where he is is own devil. 

Unfortunately that theory was upended in a bizarre sequence when Fortune, drunk on his power, turns one man into a bleating goat and another into a disco dancer, suggesting that the curse is real after all. So unless we’re supposed to assume that this entire scene is in the character’s imagination, the devil was in fact an external force as opposed to a cocaine-fueled self-destructive journey. Bummer.

In any event, Fortune becomes increasingly distraught and regretful but is unable to convince the devil to nullify their contract. After a shocking turn in a meeting with two police friends, he is shown seven years later in prison, a withered, blinded, pitiful sight with only his mother there to comfort him. In a touching moment worthy of Kabuki, the mother leaves the prison for the night without realizing, as we do, that this will be their final meeting as the son’s contract ticks down. Whether he will face eternal punishment as promised or gain absolution is not clear until the dramatic ending. The results are not pretty.

The stage is bare with only a small refrigerator filled with his favorite Diet Cokes (coke – metaphor alert) and surrounded by scattered empty coke cans. Chairs or other props are brought in for scenes like a Hollywood poolside, and the back wall opens or raises to reveal repeating spots such as the cabaret and the mother’s flower shop. Two large cubes are rolled on late in the show as the police station and the solitary jail cell, which felt odd against the open setting used throughout the rest of the show. The director often seemed deliberately to be making things “interesting” in this way for no obvious reason, like the characters moving randomly in and out, a man constantly taking flash photos, and others who appear simply to be observing. He did have a memorable ending as the producer dissolves horrifyingly into the falling sand. And the show was never boring: if it wasn’t always clear what was going on, it was certainly entertaining.

Fortune is actually a sympathetic character plagued by guilt (father) and love (woman that he wants to marry), and his reliance on drugs and/or the devil was understandable in context. The scenes at the flower shop as the tortured son tries to communicate his confused state to his down-to-earth mother were moving. I was hoping for a Damn Yankees-type reprieve at the end, but the play follows the story brutally to the inevitable consequences. The devil’s dispassionate rejection of the producer’s plea to cancel the contract suggests that we can’t change our past and to beware of what we ask for. But we knew that already.

It’s never a good idea to premiere foreign shows in Japan given the difficulties of ironing out problems: the run is fixed and does not have the designated preview period needed for new plays. Also, since Stephens presumably doesn’t speak Japanese, it’s impossible for him to catch the nuances and gauge the reaction of the audience, who are mostly only there anyway to catch superstar Morita. The show has many references to local personalities that the Japanese may or may not know, and there are character types like the naïve writer from the UK sticks and overbearing Hollywood director that would normally be distinguished in English by accent and known personality types. As everyone spoke here in the same standard Japanese, I’m not sure that Stephens’ vision was being served. That flattened a lot of the scenes, especially with the overacting of some of the minor characters, most notably in the poolside Los Angeles sequence. The music – disco, Willie Nelson, black – was clearly coordinated with the drama (“You Are Always on My Mind” and such), but might have gone over the heads of audiences here, who wouldn’t know the songs or understand the words. Script-wise, the writer may have been wiser to develop his ideas in the UK first and let the Japanese work from a finished product.

The show did benefit from strong showings by all three leads. Morita, almost never off stage throughout the three-hour show (his voice was notably husky only two weeks into the run), is again totally committed to the material and gives a powerhouse performance. It’s a high-energy role that takes the actor all over the emotional map, down to the spectacular ending, and Morita nailed it. He even has a chance this time to sing and dance, which must have delighted his rabid fan base. He reaffirmed his position as one of the best actors on the Japanese stage today.

Tabata held her own with a terrific turn as the siren-like devil, giving her a cool sexiness that could easily have been overplayed. Yoshioka was solid as the colleague who is initially attracted to the producer in her grief until assuming (perhaps wrongly) that it was he via the devil who engineered her husband’s death. Kudos also to the producer’s mother, whose dry take on the role was perfect; her visit to the son in prison was the show’s best moment. Others in the cast were simply not to that level, but those four were enough to tip the balance to the positive.

I understand that the show was compressed significantly during rehearsals and that the writer, who returned midway to the UK, gave the director free reign to cut and rearrange scenes as he pleased. It thus seems unlikely that the eventual English-language production will be exactly the same as the Japanese take, and it will be interesting to see not only what they come up with but whether it returns to Japan in a different form.