1NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
American Journal of Philology 123 (2002) 1–34 © 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
AMERICAN
JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY
NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
MAE SMETHURST
The Japanese theater director Yukio Ninagawa, known for expressing
his opposition to repressive politics in his productions during the
1960s, claimed that he staged the Medea because he wanted Japanese
women to know that they could be as strong, as straightforward, as the
character Medea. Japan, which has been the largest consumer of his
Medea, was and still is a male-dominated society.According to Ninagawa,
it is a country in which for a woman to be demure and weak is considered
a virtue.1
And yet, if you look closely at Euripides’ Medea you might
conclude that Medea, although strong, is not an ideal role model for
women.2
(This was the view of Leda Geh of the Singapore Sunday Star,
who reviewed Ninagawa’s production in 1992.)
Ninagawa’s Medea was enormously successful. It ran for more than
250 performances in Japan, in other parts of Asia, and in the West, even
though all the performances were in the Japanese language. Between the
ﬁrst productions of the Medea in 1978 and the latest in 1999, Ninagawa
played to oversold, sold-out, or virtually sold-out houses in Tokyo, Osaka,
and Nagoya, as well as in smaller cities throughout Japan.3
The 1993
1
Interview of Ninagawa by Hani Ahmad on 21 June 1992, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
for the Malay Mail.
2
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Western drama was ﬁrst
imported into Japan and staged in Western style by the Japanese, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
and Hedda Gabler were special favorites of the audiences.
3
In 1978, for example, in Tokyo’s Nissei Theater, with a capacity of twelve hundred
seats, 33,000 people attended the thirty-seven performances; the same year at the Asahi
Theater in Osaka, with a capacity of nine hundred seats, 23,400 people attended the
twenty-six performances; nine years later, in Kofu City approximately one hundred miles
2 MAE SMETHURST
production in Tokyo had a three-night run, in a theater with a capacity of
eight hundred seats, which was on average 84 percent ﬁlled.4
During a
second tour to Athens in 1984, over a two-night run at the Herodes
Atticus Theater (which has a capacity of six thousand people), fourteen
thousand attended the performances. According to the producer Tadao
Nakane (whom I interviewed in Tokyo on 15 March 1999), the audiences,
including those sitting on the sides of the Acropolis, applauded so long
and hard that tears came to his eyes.5
In London, in 1978, Tokusaburo
Arashi’s performance of Medea brought him a nomination for an Olivier
award6
and, in the fall of 1999, Ninagawa served as the ﬁrst non-Englishspeaking
foreign director of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production
of King Lear. Given these and other successes, it is clear that
Ninagawa was able to bridge the gap between the West and East, on the
one hand, by appealing to Western audiences with his Japanese productions
and, on the other, by bringing a Western play to Japanese and other
audiences.
In this article I will consider how Ninagawa was able to take this
ancient Greek tragedy and make it popular, not only with other Asian or
non-Japanese audiences but also with those in Japan. He based his Medea
on the poet Mutsuo Takahashi’s7
line-by-line adaptation of Euripides’
west of Tokyo, in a theater with a capacity of thirteen hundred seats, 3,900 people attended
over the three-night run.The statistics for all performances both in Japan and elsewhere in
the world between 1978 and 1997 are published in a program sold at the Setagaya Public
Theater during the successful 1998 run of the Medea there.
4
Ninagawa’s published notes (Ninagawa 1989) give the background to his directing
strategies of earlier productions (1966–1988) of the Medea. I assume that some of these
strategies apply to our production. I have chosen this production, rather than the latest that
I saw live,because I had at my disposal a videotape of the performance that I was able to view
repeatedly and analyze carefully.
5
The performance at the Herodes Atticus theater is mentioned as an entry in a list
of modern productions of classical plays in Walton 1987, 290; however, Walton does not
discuss this or other Ninagawa productions of the Medea in the main body of his book.Yet
it has been claimed that Ninagawa’s Medea stands on a par with Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s
Electra as a reception of a Greek tragedy. Ninagawa’s Medea is mentioned in Helene
Foley’s presidential address to the American Philological Association in 1998 (Foley 1999,
8–9).
6
Performances by Mikijiro Hira, the other actor who has played the role of Medea
for Ninagawa’s productions,also brought great applause and many curtain calls in Edinburgh,
Athens, and elsewhere.
7
Known for his religious and homoerotic writings, Mutsuo Takahashi published his
translation of the Medea, entitled O|jo Medeia (Queen Medea) in 1998. From among his
works, there have appeared in English Poems of a Penisist (Chicago Review Press 1975), A
Bunch of Keys (Crossing Press 1984), and a few poems in Koriyama and Luedens 1995.
3NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
Medea. Not all of Takahashi’s lines are used in each production; however,
Ninagawa’s productions of Medea, like his production of Oedipus the
King, do adhere to the words of the text much more closely and fully
than do Tadashi Suzuki’s Bacchae or Trojan Women. Ninagawa infused
his productions of the Medea with a very strong Japanese presence,
consisting of elements drawn from Japan past and present.And it is these
elements that I believe have helped ensure his success with Japanese
audiences who (like us) bring their own cultural baggage to the theater.
To demonstrate the Japanese content of the productions, I draw on
a live performance of the Medea that I saw in Tokyo in 1993 and on my
translations from the Japanese of both Takahashi’s adaptation of
Euripides’ text andTange Kazuhiko’s translation from the ancient Greek.8
I also draw on programs, playbills, the published notes of Ninagawa, and
videotapes of productions. I hope to show how Ninagawa infused the
Greek tragedy with a Japanese presence in the Tokyo production of 1993
and to note how that production differed from the version of his Medea
performed in Athens in 1984. I place the Tokyo performance within its
cultural context by pointing out the Japanese elements—in a play that he
had already demonstrated again and again he was able to universalize, if
not always for its social purposes, at least for its aesthetic appeal—that
carry Ninagawa’s message to his Japanese audiences.9
As will become
8
Many speeches from Takahashi’s text were shortened, such as Creon’s expression
of his fears of Medea and his threats against her (282–91); choral passages were also
omitted, such as the women’s wish that the god of love not strike them down and that
instead modesty love them (628-62). Takahashi does not use proper names for Greek
places, people, or gods, except for Medea. For example, before Medea enters from the
palace, the chorus of women in sympathy with her cries call on the goddess of law, a
daughter of the supreme god (Zeus, in the Greek). Instead of using the name Themis (169),
Takahashi has hitohashira, meaning literally “one god.” The word is a Shinto counter for
deities in which hito means “one.” Later in the Aegeus scene (667), Aegeus (who is
portrayed simply as a traveler, not as Aegeus) says that he consulted the oracle of divination
at a yashira, the Japanese word for a Shinto shrine. There are a number of other ways
in which the Japanese religions are insinuated into the text. For example, Aegeus says that
it was sadame, “gods’ decision,” that he was childless, not as in the Greek tuche, “chance” or
“luck” (671) (in Japanese Buddhist thought everything is interconnected, to the extent that
there is no such thing as chance).When Medea swears an oath with Aegeus she calls on her
father’s father and the whole race of gods, that is, the“eight million” gods, the Japanese way
of referring to all gods. As Tadao Nakane, the producer, remarked to me during our
interview, “We Japanese do not limit ourselves to one or some gods, as in Christianity or
ancient Greece. Everything and everyone can be a god” (15 March 1999, Tokyo). Tange’s
translation appears in Matsudaira 1990, 89–193.
9
I agree with the many scholars who recognize the importance of contextualizing
performances. See, for example, Goldhill 1989, 173–74.
4 MAE SMETHURST
apparent, with the exception of an occasional reference to the ancient
Greek reception of Euripides’ Medea, I do not discuss well-known controversies
nor most of the commentary on this Euripidean tragedy,though
it should be clear from my reading of Ninagawa’s directing strategies
how he resolved these controversies in his productions of the play.
To present to his Japanese audience a Medea who was a sympathetic
female character, a victim of the perceived weaknesses and constraints
of her gender, exiled by the king and forsaken by her husband
for another woman, but at the same time both strong-willed and determined
in her resolve, Ninagawa drew on some of the theatrical conventions
of kabuki, a traditional theater of Japan, and bunraku, the puppet
theater. Those who know the conventions of these theaters can see that
Ninagawa’s production is not pure kabuki or bunraku. He, in fact, describes
his Medea productions as avant-garde or modern (zeneiteki),
traditional (dento\teki), and symbolic (sho\cho\teki), and he played the
elements of kabuki and bunraku against those of other theaters and
performing arts.10
Ninagawa’s tripartite description does not include the
term “Western” because there is such a high degree of Western inﬂection
already in the Japanese way of life that what some Westerners might
label as Western elements of the performance—which in their original
form may have been inﬂuenced or inspired by the West—to a great
extent represent elements that have become fully assimilated into Japanese
culture and are no longer considered either foreign or exotic.To the
Japanese they are part of the Japanese presence.
The overture to the Medea provides one example of what Ninagawa
might have meant by his description. The music and lyrics of the song
“Daikanjo\” (Deep Feeling) were composed for this and other productions
by Hiroshi Mikami, a popular Japanese pop artist, who also sang
the lyrics, either in person or on a recording, for the various productions
(Ninagawa 1989, 129).11
The guitar music of the overture is in the mode
10
See Ninagawa 1989, 197. Ninagawa played off kabuki and bunraku also in the
shingeki and shogekijo undo\, dramatic forms introduced by the new theater movement of
the 1970s, of which Ninagawa was a member.
11
Ninagawa does not comment on the use of guitar music in the overture to his
Medea, except to say that it was inspired by Mike Oldﬁeld’s Tubular Bells. The lyrics were
not published with Takahashi’s translation, but as far as I could tell from listening to them,
and with the help of Jun Yasuba, they approximate the following:“Going to the capital city
over the sea from very ancient times, hundreds of millions, tens of thousands, and thousands
[the Japanese language can be very vague—I assume years are meant], the small
white boat bobs up and down, hundreds of millions, tens of thousands, and thousands
5NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
of modern pop folk. It sounds Western and belongs to the Pepsi-Coke
generation, to be sure; but it belongs to the Pepsi-Coke generation of
Japan, not to mention every country in which Ninagawa’s Medea has
played. With this overture, Ninagawa attracts the audience’s attention
and creates a context that is modern in sound, familiar, not foreignsounding
and therefore more than likely emotionally compelling to young
Japanese at the time of the production in 1993. With words (not drawn
from Euripides) Ninagawa transports the audience back in time to the
archaeological remains of the earliest Japanese settlement at Tsugaru,
and deep into itself, expressing the “deep feeling” of one’s body and the
cries that can be heard. Given their attitude toward this kind of music in
other contexts, the older members of the audience might have called it
new-fangled, overemotional, and unwholesome for the young, using the
kind of criticism launched against Euripides’ music by the character
Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ Frogs at lines 1301–3. Ninagawa punctuates
the music with the sound of gongs ringing, as if from a temple bell tower.
By using this convention from kabuki, especially in those kabuki plays
set at a Buddhist temple, Ninagawa adds a traditional and solemn note,
evoking the ethos and practice of Buddhism. The gong might even remind
Japanese audiences of one of the most famous passages from the
canon of Japanese literature, the ﬁrst lines of The Tale of the Heike, an
epic-like account of the famous Heike and Genji wars, dating from the
twelfth century. These wars are as famous in the Japanese context as the
Trojan Wars are within the Greek. The lines read as follows: “The sound
of the Gion Sho\ja bell echoes the impermanence of all things; the color
of the sala (teak) ﬂowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must
decline.The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night;
[miles or times]. If one goes to Miyakejima to the distant end of the sea [an island about
sixty miles south of Tokyo, traditionally a place of exile], hundreds of millions, tens of
thousands, and thousands [miles], gold and silver glisten and can be seen, can be seen, can
be seen. If one returns to Tsugaru village [the home of the tsugaru shamisen played in the
Ninagawa production and the location of some of the earliest,indigenous Japanese people],
white towers in great numbers can be seen [marking the archaeological ruins in the
Tsugaru area] beneath a dark sky in the rift between the clouds, can be seen, can be seen,
can be seen, hundreds of millions, tens of thousands, and thousands. If one goes to Hida no
Takayama [an area in the mountains, a likely burial site for Medea’s children; in some
productions she says she will bury them at the holy shrine of the god of the mountains]
down along the middle of a ﬂowing river, the blood of venerable people can be seen, can be
seen, can be seen. If one returns to the inner depths of one’s body, how many springs, from
the very, very distant past, hundreds of millions, tens of thousands, thousands, crying voices
can be heard, can be heard, can be heard.”
6 MAE SMETHURST
the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind” (McCullough
1988, 23).12
Ninagawa manipulates some of the kabuki and bunraku conventions
in such a way that he ends up subverting them. Consider, for
example, a scene that takes place in the Tokyo production during the
overture, against the backdrop of what in the traditional Japanese context
might be a rudimentary Shinto shrine or a gate, the entrance to a
Buddhist temple (these two religions have become inextricably intertwined
with each other in Japan).13
As Mikami sings to the accompaniment
of the guitar, Medea’s nurse, wearing a white headpiece that is
slightly suggestive of a Shinto priest’s headdress (to disguise her character
before the prologue), sprinkles pieces of paper about the stage.These
evoke the falling paper cherry blossoms or snow ubiquitous in kabuki
productions, themselves reminders in Japan of the impermanence of all
things in the world. However, Ninagawa directs the actor playing the role
of the nurse, before he sprinkles the pieces around, to lift what looks like
a thin book up to his face in the ritual fashion of the bunraku narrator,
the gidayu, who, on a platform to the side of the stage, always holds up
his text similarly at the start of bunraku performances, in which he both
narrates and reads the lines for the puppets. A gidayu is also present in
12
Gion Sho\ja is a monastery, built at Srãvasti, India, by a wealthy man in honor of
Sakyamuni, the Buddha.“The impermanence of all things” are words from a Buddhist text;
when the quatrains are chanted, they are accompanied by the tolling of bells set in the four
corners of the Mujo\do\ hall, where sick priests imagined that they could forget all earthly
suffering and enter Nirvana. The Nirvana sutra, where Buddha’s entrance to Nirvana is
described, says that at each corner of his bed there stood a pair of sala (teak) trees, which
bowed down toward the center and their color changed to the white of cranes as the
Buddha began to pass into Nirvana. See Kitagawa 1977, 6 nn. 1–3.
13
In one Tokyo production Ninagawa used an actual Shinto shrine, Honozono; in
another, a Buddhist temple, Sozo\ji. An interesting combination of Japanese and Greek
appear in a proscenium production in which the palace doors are covered with a large ema,
a votive plaque customarily hung on walls of buildings within a Shinto shrine’s precinct and
painted with some person, animal, or object that is closely related to the shrine. In the
production, the painting was that of the legend of the Argo. According to the producer,
Nakane, in my interview with him (15 March 1999, Tokyo), the most exciting set was the
temple Yakushiji, because, he said, this old temple was thought to have been built in the
shape of a Greek temple under inﬂuences brought along the Silk Road. For the productions
in which Hira starred as Medea, Ninagawa also used a proscenium, in one instance, a
stucco building resembling a contemporary Greek dwelling surrounded by ﬂowers.Ninagawa
claimed that the Herodes Atticus theater structure reminded him of the Yumedono, a
cylindrical building at Horiuji, the oldest standing Buddhist structure in Japan, and the
building in which Prince Shotoku, the man who introduced Buddhism into the country,
read sutras (Ninagawa 1989, 197).
7NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
some kabuki performances—those in which the texts are taken over
from bunraku—in which he both narrates and reads the lines for the
actors, as if they were dolls. The nurse, however, is not exactly a gidayu,
for she proceeds to tear up the pages and sprinkles the shreds of paper
about the stage so that they resemble blossoms or snowﬂakes. With this
gesture Ninagawa makes a strong metatheatrical statement to the
cognoscenti that he is not only using but also altering, even subverting,
kabuki and bunraku practices. In the Athens production there is no
book, there are no shreds of paper. Instead, the nurse walks from one
side of the stage at Herodes Atticus to the other, lighting torches from a
large, ﬁery torch in his hands.
Some knowledge of kabuki and bunraku techniques greatly enhances
an appreciation of the impact on a Japanese audience of the
Figure 1. Nurse. All photographs in this
article are courtesy of Point Tokyo, Japan,
the producers of Yukio Ninagawa’s plays. I
thank Point Tokyo for supplying the slides.
8 MAE SMETHURST
production’s most memorable moments. In preparation for such moments,
Ninagawa ﬁlls out the atmosphere ﬁrst created in the overture—
an atmosphere that evokes but also alters kabuki and bunraku. For
example, in this all-male cast (all-male as in kabuki and ancient performances
of Greek tragedy), a chorus of sixteen men enters strumming
shamisen, the banjo-like, three-stringed instrument usually associated
with kabuki, bunraku, and traditional Japanese dance and song. Kabuki
performances can employ a large number of shamisen players or small
choruses, but do so differently—the players who usually accompany a
dance sit in rows along the back of the stage without moving about or
engaging in dialogue or song. Kabuki choruses do not play instruments,
but do move around and do engage in a kind of dialogue, including
passing on from one member to another the words of a long speech and
then concluding it in unison, a practice known as watarizerifu. Ninagawa,
moreover, does not use the traditional shamisen of kabuki, which has a
reﬁned tone, but the tsugaru shamisen, which has an extra twang to the
sound of the strings.14
He also offsets the kabuki effects and adds an
exotic touch by dressing the chorus in wide-brimmed hats, which look
like the straw hats that are a part of the costumes of women in kabuki
(especially in female dance pieces), except that long veils drape down
from the brims to cover the chorus’s faces.The chorus also moves in ways
not typical of kabuki, diagonally across the stage in two groups and
single ﬁle.
Ninagawa’s production thus evokes kabuki and bunraku practices
without reproducing them. The nurse’s screams, for example, do not
belong to kabuki, as they would to a Greek production. Yet Medea—as
played in the Tokyo production by Tokusaburo Arashi, a kabuki actor
trained in the rigors of an onnagata, that is, one who traditionally plays
female roles—ﬁrst appears after the tutor has led the two children away
and, in a pure kabuki style, speaks at the doors, which are now identiﬁed
as those of Medea’s palace. Medea says, “Of all beings that exist within
this world the most pitiable ones are we, that is, women.”15
It is this voice
14
The tsugaru shamisen originated in Tsugaru (Aomori) in a northern section of
Japan mentioned in the overture and was just beginning to enjoy great popularity with
urban audiences in concerts throughout Japan at about the time of the ﬁrst performance of
the Medea in Tokyo.The instrument provided Ninagawa with another ready way of engaging
his audiences’ attention with a contemporary sound.
15
Here as elsewhere my translation is based on the Takahashi text. These words
translate Med. 230–31 of the Greek, which here as elsewhere refers to Diggle 1984, and the
Japanese translation by Kazuhiko Tange. It is not my intent always to cite the Greek that
9NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
that transforms the Tokyo performance as much as any other feature
into one with a strong kabuki presence.Although Arashi allows his voice
to sound masculine when Ninagawa so directs, the assumed female voice,
along with Arashi’s gestures and costume, continues to surface and to
remind the audience that this is the voice of the onnagata in the world of
kabuki. It is a world that Ninagawa brilliantly manipulates by piling
Japanese layers on Western-inﬂuenced ones, traditional on modern, female
on male, one on top of the other. In the Greek production, by
contrast, the actor playing Medea (Mikijiro Hira) sounds masculine at
the start of the play.
Flute music, soft and mellow, plays from offstage in the background
in all the productions, in the manner of the traditional kabuki ﬂute.Yet it
sounds like New Age music in some scenes; when a violin is added, it
sounds like traditional Western classical music—Samuel Barber’s Adagio
for Strings, for example. These instruments replace the guitar of the
overture and the shamisen used by the chorus when it ﬁrst enters. A
musical mélange is conventional in kabuki, but the music is of a very
different kind.16
Medea’s costume in both the Tokyo and the Athens productions is
a gorgeous robe weighing approximately twenty kilograms (ﬁfty pounds),
heavily layered, with an interior third layer in red—almost, but not quite,
the red worn in kabuki and bunraku by young women and geisha. The
robe both is and is not a kimono.17
Missing is the large and voluminous
obi, the hallmark of repressed Japanese women, a sash wound around
the waist almost high enough to bind the breasts, sometimes ﬂaring out
in front with winglike projections to obscure the chest, waist, and abdomen.
Instead, with great attention to detail—the hallmark of a Ninagawan
production—Jusaburo Tsujimura,the costumer and artistic director, took
ﬁfty antique brocade obis, cut them up, sewed them together again, and
used them not to bind but to create the magniﬁcent outer robe, under
which a second layer of the costume is visible, which exposes the large
(artiﬁcial) breasts attached to it. Medea’s large headdress reproduces the
size and evokes the general shape of the headdresses of some women’s
roles in kabuki (especially those of geisha), including the long ribbons
corresponds to Takahashi’s text, though I wish to show that Ninagawa adheres to the
sequence of lines in the original and thus to more than just its spirit.
16
On the subject of Japanese music in kabuki, as well as other aspects of this
theatrical form, see Brandon 1978.
17
See Ninagawa 1989, 128.
10 MAE SMETHURST
hanging down over each shoulder.But the headdress created byTsujimura
has dangling sequins and decorations, including what look like ram’s
horns and a baby doll’s face, replacing the usual hair ornaments, which
normally include such items as cherry blossoms and combs placed in
black hair elaborately coiffed into a large wig. Medea’s partially blackened
teeth and white face makeup are a conventional part of female
roles in kabuki, hearkening back to the style of women in the late eighth
to late twelfth centuries (though at that time the faces were a starker
white, more like the female faces on black-ﬁgured Greek vases of antiquity).The
light black and blue makeup applied around Medea’s eyes are
conventional colors in kabuki makeup—but in kabuki they are used on
a male character or a supernatural or evil being, rather than on a human
female, and they are more pronounced.
The intensity of the kabuki infusion into the play increases after
the king exits and Medea has learned that she and the children will be
exiled. It is then that the Japanese audiences hear, as the Greek audiences
did not, the clack of the ki, rectangular wooden clappers struck
against the ﬂoor in kabuki performances to alert the audiences that
especially dramatic moments, usually ﬁlled with emotion, are occurring.
These are the high points for which many, probably most, Japanese go to
the kabuki and bunraku theaters. From the time that kabuki ﬁrst developed
into an artistic form, it has appealed to audiences because of its
theatricality, the ability of its actors, and the visual and aural color and
excitement of its productions. For kabuki audiences, it is these, not the
structure or the plots of the plays, that are the indicators of character.
The human beings, their problems and their calamities, are considered
most important. In fact, kabuki and bunraku plots are of the type that
Aristotle would have called episodic. Kabuki performances often consist
of only an episode or two pulled out of a longer play. Japanese critics,
scholars, and members of an audience in a kabuki theater are not likely
to sympathize with Aristotle’s claim that the sudden entrance of the
character Aegeus, later in the play, is illogical. In that scene, the kabuki
audience would concentrate on the characters, Aegeus and Medea, not
the structural probability or necessity of his being there.
In Ninagawa’s Tokyo production the ﬁrst theatrically engaging
moment occurs when the ki ﬁrst sounds and Medea by herself says, in her
kabuki voice, that for revenge against the king (who has decided to exile
her) and her husband (who has abandoned her) she will destroy her
three enemies—these two men and her husband’s newly betrothed (Med.
374–75). As the ki starts clacking, Arashi assumes a mie pose and laughs
in a kabuki style—a sustained burst of laughter that is controlled and
11NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
manic. Arashi’s mie is slightly quicker and shorter in duration than the
conventional version, in which the kabuki actor rolls his head around,
nods, and then crosses one eye with a powerful glare; however, there is
no mistaking this pose for what it suggests, inasmuch as the ki draws our
attention to it, as it would do in a kabuki performance. The ki is used
again several times later in the play, including the scenes in which we
hear that Medea will kill her own children (Med. 792–93) and, later, that
the princess and the king are dead (Med. 1125–26).
Like the distinctive laugh and the ki, the mie pose is a marker of
especially dramatic moments in kabuki; however, once again Ninagawa
manipulates and alters by allowing an onnagata to assume this mie pose.
In kabuki that is the privilege of the tachiyaku, the player of a strong,
“macho” male. At the same time, Ninagawa also allows Arashi’s male
voice to emerge as he climbs up the stairs to the palace, holding his sword
in a show of strength, and then descends very deliberately to the accompaniment
of the ki clacking even more insistently than before. The
Figure 2. Medea.
12 MAE SMETHURST
audience is alerted to what Ninagawa calls the ambivalence of Medea’s
persona.
These borrowings from modes of acting in kabuki and bunraku
help to prepare for the chorus’s declaration of what Ninagawa viewed as
his intent in producing the play. At ﬁrst individually and then in unison,
the chorus declaims the following words (it does not sing as it would
have done in the original Greek):
The direction of the river’s ﬂow changes; there is nothing in the world that
does not change. Men’s hearts, which are unreliable, change with exceptional
ease. We do not know when, but their ﬁrm oaths made in the name
of god will be broken. Should not women be praised and extolled for their
virtue instead of men who tell lies excessively? The singers of tales should
be ashamed [of themselves] for singing what is far from the truth, namely,
that the hearts of women are inconstant. If the god of music takes up his
lyre and empowers women in their breasts to make the decision, then at
that time we will want to sing with loud voices that it is not a woman’s
heart that easily changes but a man’s. There are many songs to be sung
about us as well, who are not men.18
This is the moment in which Ninagawa speaks with visual and
verbal conviction directly to the audience. With a superb display of
theatricality, in which the form underscores the content of Takahashi’s
written text—thanks in great part to the talents of the artistic director,
Tsujimura, who was trained in bunraku puppet techniques—Ninagawa
marks the inversion of the traditional roles of women by inverting a
kabuki convention.In place of the traditional Japanese music of shamisen
and the ﬂute, the music, sounding now vaguely like Handel, or Corelli’s
La Follia—music heard again and again in this performance—is played
loudly, accompanied by the chiming of church bells.19
Medea and each
of the chorus members draw red ribbons slowly and deliberately out of
18
Takahashi has changed the original and given the women a slightly more positive
outlook than we ﬁnd in the Greek or in Tange’s versions. Kovacs’s translation of the beginning
of this choral ode (410–30) reads as follows: “The poetry of ancient bards will cease to
hymn our faithlessness. Phoebus, lord of songs, did not endow women’s minds with the
glorious strains of the lyre, else I could have sounded a hymn in reply to the male sex.Time
in its long expanse can say many things of men’s lot as well as women’s.” See Kovacs 1994.
19
Whether Ninagawa intended the audience to think of the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga”
from Rinaldo or not, it seems more than a coincidence that the opera not only dates from
the time when kabuki and bunraku ﬂourished but also features a sorceress, as well as a
vehicle drawn by two dragons of the sort Ninagawa uses at the ﬁnale of his Medea. I owe
the identiﬁcation of this music as the melody from La Follia to Marianne McDonald.
13NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
their mouths in a piece of choreography performed en masse. Ninagawa’s
staging suggests on one level that the chorus and Medea are spewing
blood—red ribbons can signify blood in both kabuki and bunraku.20
However, these theaters also use red ribbons differently.The very popular
and frequently performed dance piece, Fuji musume (Wisteria Girl),
for example, features a lovely woman—the spirit of the wisteria—a girl
at play, falling in love, coy, and coquettish. To express her love, kabuki
convention requires that the actor playing the girl place the red ribbons
attached to his red hat into his mouth.21
Ninagawa’s Medea and the
chorus do not place the ribbons into their mouths; they spew the ribbons
out. The egurgitation of the red ribbons is a stunning alteration, if
not subversion, of kabuki practices.
20
Ninagawa says that the visual effect seems like that of blood (Ninagawa 1989, 196).
Red ribbons signify blood, for example, in the kabuki Shinobiyoru koi (ha) kusemono (The
Witch Princess).
21
An onnagata actor like Tamasaburo Bando, whose performance of this role in
March 1999 at the Kabukiza in Tokyo is just one example of his virtuosity, can be exquisite
in his display of enticing femininity.
Figure 3. Medea drawing a red ribbon from her mouth.
14 MAE SMETHURST
All these kabuki practices, signiﬁcantly, apply almost exclusively to
Medea, the female chorus, and the nurse. It is Arashi, the actor in the
Medea role, who uses the distinctively kabuki style of delivery in his
speeches, his laughter, and his crying; the other actors speak for the most
part in the style of the modern Japanese classical theater or, in the case
of Aegeus, in the style of contemporary, realistic Japanese theater. (This
level of subtlety in the characterization was missing in the Greek pro-
duction.)
In the scene where the king ﬁrst appears onstage in Takahashi’s
version of the text, unlike the other texts, Creon addresses Medea (Med.
271) as ikoku no onna, a woman from a foreign land. Because the
Japanese phrase can also mean a woman from somewhere else within
Japan but outside the capital city, Ninagawa can represent Medea as a
Japanese: she speaks Japanese and is not explicitly called a foreigner
from another country by any of the male characters.22
Only the nurse,
the chorus, and Medea herself say that she belongs to another realm.
And yet Ninagawa does differentiate her from the other characters. She
is an ikoku no onna, an outsider, because she and she alone is permitted
to speak in a pure kabuki style. And when she does, she lies outside the
norm; she becomes an anachronistic ﬁgure within the context of the
play.
The other characters adhere closely to one style of speech, that of
the modern theater, not kabuki, and during the course of the performance
remain consistent to this type. For example, the nurse, the tutor, and
the messenger—all servants—use polite language in speaking to Medea
and her children, although not particularly with each other.23
In a way
the Greek language does not, the status markers in the morphology of
the Japanese language readily indicate when someone places himself or
herself in a position inferior or superior to another character. Creon,
being the king, does not use polite forms when speaking with Medea,
and, using locutions associated with an older person, sounds old-fashioned
22
At Med. 536 and 591, one can read barbaros as meaning “foreigner” or as “Ainu,”
that is, an indigenous Japanese from the northern area in which Tsugaru is located; however,
ikyo at line 256 should mean “foreign” (a word spoken by Medea). Line 1330 in the
Japanese version reads: “from a land that touches the sky rather than the one over which
the sun’s light pours.” These words, spoken by Jason, again probably refer to the northern
part of Japan, not a foreign country.
23
The nurse very politely tells the children to enter the palace: ohairi nasaimashi
“please enter.”The paidagogos, moriyaki, is not particularly polite when he speaks with the
nurse, but is polite with Medea. The messenger, after speaking politely to Medea, changes
to the narrative mode in his report.
15NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
throughout.24
Medea’s husband, Jason, on the other hand, speaks in a
modern and impolite (rude as well as informal or brusque) manner to his
wife, like the stereotypical Japanese husband of the time of the productions.
In the Greek text of Euripides he calls her gunai (Med. 525), not
Medea; in the Japanese, he uses abrupt endings to all of his sentences.
My last example of inversion of kabuki or bunraku practice is
Ninagawa’s decision to have Aegeus speak a standard, contemporary
Japanese, making him the least theatrical and the most polite among the
men of any status in the play. Aegeus has come from “the capital city”
(where Medea will also ﬁnd refuge), which in the Japanese production
means Tokyo, the location of the theater; instead of referring to Athens
as the city of Pallas (Med. 771), Medea refers to miyako, which to the
Japanese can mean only their capital. Is Ninagawa suggesting with the
language of Aegeus and his display of respect toward Medea that there
is hope for the women in the audience, who are in Tokyo, that men and
women can talk to each other as equals at least there? The tone of
Aegeus’ speeches is strikingly different from that of Creon and Jason.25
Given his onnagata training, Arashi can in his speeches easily and
naturally use the kabuki intonation of a female, a forsaken woman, a
geisha or a seductive woman, and in all of these depict Medea as a
traditional woman, a victim of her society, and polite in her speech. She
belongs to the world of kabuki in which an onnagata can represent a
single character in various manifestations,such as,for example,the woman
in the popular kabuki Musume Do\jo\ji (The Maiden of Do\jo\ji). She is
ﬁrst a jilted maiden, then a courtesan, who is in fact a maiden in disguise
trying to inveigle her way into a temple to exact revenge on the man who
jilted her, and ﬁnally an avenging spirit in the form of a serpent. In
addition, Arashi can speak in a masculine or a neutral Japanese when so
directed and depict Medea as strong in her resolve, modern, and able to
take control of her own life.26
Ninagawa uses the world of kabuki to
24
For example, at Med. 316–17, he says,“You speak words mild-sounding to the ear,
but I am afraid that you are planning something evil.” In the Japanese he says, “What you
say is mild sounding, but frightening” (otonashii yaka). Here Takahashi tries to capture the
ﬂavor of the old-fashioned Greek word orro\dia “fear”; in the Japanese the sufﬁx -yaka
attached to the adjective otonashii, which means “gentle, mild, or grown-up,” also sounds
old-fashioned.
25
The chorus members speak politely, but not as politely as the nurse. They use the
form kudasai, instead of nasaimashi (se). However, to Jason they speak more politely (Med.
576–78), after his long speech and when they are praying to gods.
26
The ﬂexibility thus derived is an immeasurable advantage to Ninagawa’s depiction
of Medea as modern and traditional, feminine and masculine, and victim and victimizer.
16 MAE SMETHURST
Figure4.MedeaandChorus.
17NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
create a persona with many faces; his Medea is that of an actor trained as
an onnagata who does not always follow the dictates of his very strictly
disciplined and in some respects feudalistic training. He steps in and out
of conventional behavior, representing a Medea who does likewise. She
not only steps in and out of different images of a woman but also crosses
the lines of gender.
For example, Medea speaks naturally and without markers of status
when she speaks to her own soul, steeling herself to kill her children,
without an assumed kabuki onnagata voice, without a masculine voice;
but when she weeps, clinging to Creon, her voice and her cries come
directly out of the kabuki style of onnagata delivery,27
with a level of
politeness and deference all the more apparent because the king speaks
brusquely and uses informal syntax, in the style of the modern classical
Japanese theater.28
But when her faithless husband enters and speaks in
very abrupt language to her, Medea responds in kind. Now Arashi’s
rough intonation sounds like that of a man. She throws the red ribbons at
him, then switches to a sarcastic use of polite forms and words to challenge
his sophistic attempts to explain why it is beneﬁcial to her and the
children that he marry another woman. Politeness is a sign of sarcasm in
Japanese for both men and women when it is used with those with whom
one does not have to be polite.29
27
For example, instead of using the simple desu, the neutral form of the verb “is,” at
307–8, she says, arumai dewa gozaimasen ka. The sentence, directly translated, reads, “Is it
not so that I, in an inferior position, would not intend to oppose you and the royal house?”
Gozaimasen is more polite than desu. In Japanese, the more indirection there is (as in
Medea’s speech), the politer the language becomes, and the politer the Japanese language
becomes, the more deference one shows. In the Greek she says, “Don’t be afraid of me,
Creon. I am not in such a position as to commit a fault against royal personages.” She is
polite to the king in Tange’s translation, but less so in Takahashi’s. When left alone, she
continues to use her kabuki voice, but with male terms of abuse. She calls Creon a“moron,”
manuke, and “monster of cruelty,” hitodenashi, words of extreme insult in Japanese.
28
As in the language of Ninagawa and Nakane’s productions of Genroku Minato
Uta (Genroku Harbor Song), set in the Genroku period (1688–1704).
29
Ever in control of each situation, as the other characters are not, she says, after
enumerating the ways in which she helped Jason, including the murder of her own brother
and leaving her own home, O yasashii anata wa sono orei ni to, kono watakushi o hito mo
urayamu tobikiri shiawase na onna ni shite kudasatta koto. Anata to iu okata wa, hontou ni
gorippa na, hontou ni tanomi kai no aru otto desu wa (Takahashi 1998, 40), “Oh, how nice
and courteous you are and what a fortunate person people out of envy will think I am for
all you have done for me. And as for you, you are a truly wonderful, truly effective
husband.” The Greek (e.g., Med. 499–506) is sarcastic; however, even if we take into
account the actors’ styles of delivery and their gestures, the sarcasm is more intense in the
Japanese by virtue of the position into which the language helps Medea place herself—she
ends the second sentence of the Japanese with desu wa, a very feminine way of speaking.
18 MAE SMETHURST
In the next scene, when she begs Aegeus to grant her asylum in his
city, she speaks at ﬁrst at the most polite level found in kabuki, saying in
place of the more customary word anata, meaning “you,” the very polite
word anatasama (used ﬁve times; cf. Med. 709–18) and instead of kudasai,
meaning“please,”saying kudasaimashi (cf.Med. 709). Arashi here assumes
the feminine and geisha onnagata style of delivery, seducing Aegeus in
both intonation and words. Arashi’s gestures enhance the effect of the
voice: Medea places her hands on her breast in a modern style of seduction
and holds the end of one of her kimono sleeves up toward her
mouth when she claims that women are weak, in a kabuki, geisha style of
seduction. In the Athens production the actor does not use his sleeve this
way; there, the breasts do the speaking. In the Tokyo production the
scene is suggestive of seduction scenes in kabuki, which have always
been a major attraction to the kabuki enthusiast, an opportunity to see
how well the onnagata can play his role. It gives us the kind of scene that
the character Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ comic play Frogs, at lines 1043–
44, might have chosen to criticize as an example of Euripides’ portrayal
of active sexuality by women on stage.
Successful in her attempt to gain asylum into the capital city,
Medea then speaks as an equal to Aegeus, without the seductive language
and gestures and persuades him to take an oath on her own terms,
not as a man, but as a woman. Later, because she was successful with
Aegeus, she uses the same technique of seduction when she elicits from
her husband a promise that he will ask the princess, his betrothed, to
entreat her father not to exile their children (cf. Med. 925–68). Earlier
her polite tone with him had been sarcastic, but now, as the actor’s
gestures clearly indicate, the tone becomes politely seductive, the language
of the bedroom. And as one might expect, since Medea is playing
the weaker sex, her husband, unlike Aegeus, becomes even more masculine
sounding than in the earlier scene. In the Greek text (Med. 902–5)
she speaks of tears; in the Japanese, she uses a female kabuki intonation
throughout. In the Greek he says malista “certainly” (Med. 944); in the
Japanese he grunts un, instead of saying yes and says, yatte miyo “Yeh, I’ll
try.”30
Takahashi’s language and Ninagawa’s direction portray Aegeus as
an archetypically boorish man in a modern world, all too familiar to the
women in the audience. However, the shamisen music in the background,
the silk-tasseled cover on the Japanese-style gift box that contains the
30
Probably a mistranslation of 944 peisein ge doxazo\ sph’ego\ “I think that I shall
persuade her.” The clacking of the ki is heard at the time of her decision to send the gift.
19NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
poisoned robe intended for the princess, the adornments hanging down
Medea’s face, and the gestures reinforcing Arashi’s style of onnagata
delivery all belong to a world of the past, disguising this contemporary
issue. By capitalizing on the kabuki practice of setting contemporary
events and issues into a ﬁctional or legendary context so as to avoid the
sanctions of censorship during the Tokugawa period (the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, when kabuki ﬁrst developed), Ninagawa better
directs his message at the audience. He does this not because there is
censorship in Japan related to women’s issues but to avoid sounding too
didactic.
By using Arashi’s kabuki style of acting to confer on Medea the
Figure 5. Medea and Aegeus.
20 MAE SMETHURST
special status of having more than one persona, Ninagawa sets her squarely
into the time frame of Japan past; he also molds her into someone equal
to men. But the masculine code of the Tokugawa period, which Medea
imitates when she acts ﬁrmly and in control, is outdated and inoperable.
Thus he avoids the problem of forcing his Japanese audience into thinking
that contemporary women have to be like men in order to take control
of their lives. His Medea interacts with men who belong to a different
world than she does, that is, the world of contemporary theater, not of
kabuki. Ninagawa creates a production that demonstrates that, with the
exception of Aegeus, men acting like contemporary Japanese men are
treating women as if they belonged to the Tokugawa era, and simultaneously
that women, like Medea, can escape from their stereotypical
roles by rejecting outmoded conventions and ethical norms.31
In kabuki the traditional samurai code of honor (which included
individualistic integrity and a strong sense of pride and self-will) was one
that the shoguns who ruled Japan during the Tokugawa period tried to
suppress in favor of Confucian doctrines. These included above all loyalty
and obedience to a superior authority: the subject to his lord, the
child to its father, wife to her husband, and younger to elder brother.This
moral principle of giri and ninjo\—creating as it did the conﬂict between
one’s social duty, giri, and personal interests, ninjo\—lies at the source of
the pathos in kabuki’s most emotionally gripping scenes, in which characters
are caught in the web of this conﬂict. In the context of the kabuki
world, giri is such a strong sanction that it can cause parents to sell their
daughters into prostitution, kill their children, or sacriﬁce their own
lives.32
Medea ﬁts naturally into the traditional Japanese context driven by
31
Ninagawa claimed that his productions of Medea were in part a parodei, the
Japanese pronunciation of “parody,” not meaning “parody” exactly in our sense of the
word, but more like the practice in kabuki of disguising something, be it old or legendary
or famous, into something else in terms that are not so much vulgar, as they are familiar. In
kabuki many characters appear disguised as someone other than they seem to be. For
example, in one of the most popular plays, Sukeroku Yukari no Edo Zakura, Sukeroku is a
suave, likeable man-about-town with his eyes on the geisha Agemaki. He is really the hero
Soga no Go\ro\ in disguise, one of the famous Soga brothers, known in legend for avenging
their father’s death and as famous in Japan as Orestes is in Greek legend. For a translation,
see Brandon 1975, 51–92. Other kabuki featuring disguised characters who play a lead role
are Rokkasen (Six Poets) and Narukami (Narukami, the Priest).
32
See, for example, the Terakoya (The Village School), a scene from Sugawara Denju
Tenarai Kagamai (The Secret of Sugawara’s Calligraphy), summarized in Scott 1955, 261–
70.
21NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
this ethic: as a wife who has been treated shamefully by her husband, she
is disgraced, dishonored, and humiliated and thus must get revenge. She
says that Jason knows no shame—haji shirazu, a translation of the Greek
anaideia (Med. 472). Near the end of the play, Medea in a strong male
voice says to Jason (Med. 1354–60),“You were going to make a laughing
stock out of me in front of other people when you yourself were about to
lead a uniquely pleasant life and despise the bed of one bound by duty to
her household. I have ﬁttingly stung you so that your anger cannot be
healed.” In the Greek of Euripides she says that Jason dishonored her,
atimasas (Med. 1354); in the Japanese she says that she was loyal to her
duty, giri, that is, in contrast to ninjo\, her personal interest, and that Jason
despised their marriage contract. In the traditional Japanese context of
giri and ninjo\, this means that he dishonored her; it also means that she
was treated unfairly, for she has been loyal to her husband as the Confucian
ethic requires. Ninagawa elevates Medea not only above ordinary
women but also above ordinary human beings. She is made to speak like
the famous heroes of kabuki. If she has any integrity and sense of honor,
she must act. Her situation is like that of Yoshitsune, the most popular
Japanese legendary hero, whose story is told in The Tale of the Heike.
Though loyal to his brother, Yoshitsune was then betrayed by him.
Yoshitsune’s integrity reaches such a high level that when his brother,
exploiting him for reasons of personal aggrandizement, orders Yoshitsune’s
wife and child put to death,Yoshitsune kills them himself. Numerous
other legends have risen up around the ﬁgure of Yoshitsune, most of
them folklore; there is, however, one certain fact about him—he, like
many other avenging heroes of Japan, became a leading character of
kabuki, bunraku, and noh plays. These were not merely valiant men but
hitokami, “man gods,” who had the power of performing miraculous
feats, even appeasing powerful, revengeful spirits.33
Ninagawa sets Medea up on a pedestal, on a level equal with these
men, who, when unfairly treated by those in power, exacted revenge out
of a sense of honor. But of course he is using the ethical sanctions out of
the world of kabuki only to subvert them: Medea is not a man but a
woman.As she disrobes, Medea says in a strong voice,“Let no one think
this woman is weak, this woman is spineless.” (The Japanese repeats the
word onna, “woman,” twice; the Greek uses feminine endings without
emphasizing her feminine gender [Med. 807–8].) “No,” she says,“it is the
33
See Ortolani 1995, 170 and 172, on bridging the gap between our world and the
spiritual in kabuki.
22 MAE SMETHURST
opposite. I am one who understand no mercy at all toward my enemies
and no limit of devotion toward my friends.” Here the Japanese and the
Greek texts are almost identical; in the epic tradition of both cultures the
language belongs to heroes.34
Ninagawa draws on the conventions of kabuki and bunraku performance
techniques to emphasize Medea’s decision to take revenge on
her enemies. Following a kabuki convention called hikinuki, that is, the
removal of one’s costume during the course of a play, Ninagawa directs
Arashi to remove several layers of robe, including the attached breasts
that had marked Medea’s sexuality. His elaborate costume is a visible
sign of how restrained Medea has been within her female trappings.
(Arashi has said that three months before he plays the role of Medea he
must jog, swim, and cycle daily in order to build up his strength to bear
the burden of both the role and the weight of the costume.)35
And, in
accordance with another kabuki convention, that of featuring characters
disguised as someone else and representing themselves as someone else
(there is scarcely a kabuki play without a disguised character whose
identity the audience waits to discover), Arashi reveals the male, selfassertive
side of Medea’s character thus far disguised; with her kimono
removed, Medea stands before the audience stripped down to a red
sheath, angry and resolved to act, like a Japanese male hero.
The characters in kabuki, male or female, who have to sacriﬁce
family members to maintain their honor, never do so without a struggle.36
It is not easy for Medea to make the decision to kill her own children.
During her monologue Medea struggles with herself and wonders whether
she should kill the children for whom she suffered such pain in child-
34
Takahashi’s text (1998, 59) reads (in translation): “With splendid praise to be
praised as a heroine in songs and tales, isn’t that what kind of person a woman (that is, I)
should be?”The Greek at lines 809–10 reads:“hard on enemies and kind to friends, for such
people have the life of greatest glory [eukleestatos bios].”Taking out of the Greek adjective,
eukleestatos, the word kleos, “the glory/fame of a Greek hero and warrior,” Takahashi
applies the heroism to Medea and embellishes upon it. The uncommon word retsujo,
containing the feminine sufﬁx -jo and the preﬁxed Chinese character meaning “strongwilled
and passionately determined on a course of action” (a Chinese character found in
more than one word meaning “hero”) means “heroine.”And the question “to be praised in
songs and tales, isn’t that what kind of person a woman (that is, I) should be” provides the
beginnings of Medea’s realization of the hope of a future in which women are the subject
of song. This was ﬁrst expressed in the choral piece during which she and the chorus
egurgitated convention, symbolized by the red ribbons.
35
Interview with Tadao Nakane, 15 March 1999, Tokyo.
36
See, for example, Ernst 1956, 233–34, 237, and 244–45.
23NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
birth, who could comfort her as she wanders from place to place, who are
the children she embraced and suckled with milk at her breast. These
words, delivered in onnagata style, are not in the Greek; even in the
Athens production the actor who plays Medea, Hira, delivers them in a
feminine style, though up until this point in the play he sounds very
masculine.37
When Medea returns to the words of Euripides (Med. 1056),
she asks her heart, kokoro (thumos, in the Greek), not to carry out the
act. But she also says to herself, with the intonation of a man (in both the
Tokyo and Athens productions),“Don’t be weak.” She struggles over the
impending deed, with all of the emotion that a kabuki actor can muster.
However, using the very reasoning that the hero Yoshitsune might have
37
The breast is emphasized throughout both the Tokyo and Athens productions
through gestures, costume, and text: the nurse refers to Medea as the one whom she nursed
at her breast (Takahashi 1998, 9); Medea says that a storm rises in her breast (32), that she
has a plan in her breast (55) and a thought in her breast (56), and that her breast is crushed
(77); in his last speech Jason tears off his robes “down to his breast” (97).
Figure 6. Medea with the Chorus.
24 MAE SMETHURST
used, she understands that the consequences of not killing the children
would be to expose them to the contempt of her enemies. And so she
makes a vow to the bloodthirsty beings in hell (Med. 1059–61),“I will not
in full knowledge of what I am doing surrender to the enemy these
children. Their fortune [shiawase] is greater if they die at their mother’s
hands than face the contempt of the enemy.” She then adds,“My chest is
crushed [the Greek here reads alla niko\mai kakois “I am overcome with
evils”; Med. 1077]. I understand what kind of terrible thing I do. And
although I understand, I must do it.”And then she explains (Med. 1077–
78), “Even though I understand that it is the source of wazawai [‘evils,’
but also ‘serious trouble, woe, disaster, calamity, evil, ruin, kaka], my
ikido\roshisa [‘resentment, feeling of insult’],” she says, “is stronger.” In
the Greek these well-discussed lines read, thumos de kreisso\n to\n emo\n
bouleumato\n hosper megisto\n aitios kako\n brotois (Med. 1079–80).
Takahashi translates thumos (“the place out of which arise emotions like
anger, passion”) as “resentment”; he does not include the controversial
second half of the Greek sentence, which explains what her feeling is
stronger than or in control of.38
In the Japanese, Medea says simply that
she has been insulted and resents that insult. Dishonored in this way, she
feels justiﬁed in her actions, in spite of the consequences, and she appeals
to the right for retribution.The pathos and the emotional outpourings in
this scene are extraordinarily intense. Medea confronts a difﬁcult choice
among the emotions deep within her, as characters do in similar scenes
of kabuki in which giri and ninjo\ are in conﬂict. If she is a true Japanese
hero, however, there is no choice; she must act. There is no intellectual
discourse involved here, but there is emotional outpouring. It is for this
that an audience in a kabuki theater would be waiting.
Many scholars have observed that Euripides’ Medea is like a hero,
inﬂexible, strong-willed, and determined to take revenge, because of the
dishonor that has befallen her.39
Many others have said that the dishonor
does not alleviate the horror and consternation we feel over her murder
of the children, a viewpoint shared by Lida Geh in her critique of the
38
Many scholars have published articles on the subject of Medea’s speech and the
authenticity of the lines. Among them are Reeve (1972, 51–61) and Foley (1989, 61–85 and
273–87).
39
The bibliography is large. Among the many who have said that Medea is like a
hero, has lost her womanhood, and acts like a man, there are Knox (1977, 193–225), Bongie
(1977, 27–56), Easterling (1977, 177–79), Burnett (1973, 1–24), des Bouvrie (1990), and
Rehm (1989, 97–115).
25NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
Medea performed in Singapore.40
In fact, Ninagawa seems to intensify
the emotional impact of the murder by bringing the children on stage,
allowing them to interact intimately with Medea before she kills them,
and, following Euripides’ text closely, by having them cry out loudly for
help from within the palace during the murder.41
(This is one of the
scenes in which the feminine side of the actor Hira in Athens emerged
brilliantly.) In kabuki, the participation of child actors onstage moves the
audience strongly;42
many take out handkerchiefs to dry their tear-ﬁlled
eyes. When kabuki productions of tragic pieces are successful, men and
women alike permit themselves a display of emotions that their culture
40
See, for example, Easterling 1977, 188.
41
In the performance, according to kabuki convention, although the children are
standing at the top of the stairs in full view of the audience, they are considered outside the
action. The audience does not think of them as participating characters until Medea
addresses them again and they come down the stairs to her side.
42
In Sakaya (The Sake Shop) a child carries a missive announcing his parents’
impending suicide to his grandparents. In Hirakana seisuiki (Simple Chronicle of the
Vicissitudes of the Heike and Genji Clans), a child speaks only at the end of the play and
is saved from being killed. See Gunji and Yoshida 1987, 69.
Figure 7. Medea at the palace doors and Chorus below.
26 MAE SMETHURST
does not allow in public, outside the theater.43
And yet, these productions,
even when a child is decapitated, do not shock. There is an honorable
justiﬁcation for the killing.
In defending Euripides against the charge of excessive violence—
and in spite of Aristotle’s criticism of the scene as a contrivance (Poet.
54b1)—some classicists have argued that Euripides mitigates the effect
of Medea’s murder of her children by transporting her on the serpentdrawn
vehicle of Helios to another world, one where she no longer need
be judged by human standards. To some extent Ninagawa would agree
with them, although he imported Aristotle’s term katarushisu “catharsis”
to describe the effect he wanted to have on his audience (Ninagawa 1989,
198).
In the ﬁnale, after the murder of her children, Medea, now wearing
the all-white robes and makeup appropriate in kabuki to a supernatural
being, enters from above on a chariot drawn by a pair of dragons and
suspended by a crane. In the Athens production the chariot is drawn by
a pair of winged horses. He thus uses a technique that it is generally
agreed Euripides employed,44
one that is also familiar to kabuki audiences,
called chu\nori, literally meaning “riding through the air,” which
allows actors to be carried up over the stage or out over the audience’s
heads by a crane or pulley.45
Like a Japanese hero, Medea now is superior
to all other human beings. She literally rises above them, and has become
a hitokami“a god person,” like the heroes of Japanese legend and kabuki.
This is theatricality played to the hilt. The audience’s attention is directed
for a moment toward the spectacle, opsis, and away from the
murder. She is disguised like many a kabuki character; however, that
43
See, for example, on Greek tragedy, Zeitlin 1996, 363. According to Aelian, Varia
historia 14.40, the actor Theodoros (associated with female roles such as Antigone,
Demosthenes 19.246) was very talented in imitating the voice of his character and drew
tears from members of the audiences, even from the tyrant Alexander of Pherai, when he
played the role of Hecuba in Euripides’ Trojan Women (Arist.Rhet. 1404b21–24).The actor
Polos had the same talent for making members of the audience cry when playing the
female Electra (Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 6.5.7).
44
See Mastronarde 1990, 247–94.
45
The device is used for magical creatures, supernatural creatures, and ghosts. For
example, in the kabuki Yoshitsune sembonzakura (Yoshitsune of the Thousand Cherry
Trees),Yoshitsune’s retainer Tadanobu, a fox in disguise, rises up into the sky and is carried
over the heads of the audience (this scene is reproduced in the background of the set for
Genroku Minato Uta). I have had the experience of being in the audience at the Minamiza
Theater in Kyoto and seeing the actor Ennosuke in the role of the hero Yamato Takeru (a
character connected closely with Japan’s founding myth) swoop over my head.
27NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
disguise is multilayered, like her robes. Even on the chariot she represents
more than a hitokami.
In their ﬁnal exchange, when Jason threatens Medea with onryo\,
the hungry ghosts of their children (a translation of miastores “avenging
spirits” [Med. 1371]) that will ﬂy around Medea’s head for her hideous
act, she reinforces her justiﬁcation for the killing in terms of the traditional
Japanese heroic ethos and refuses him the burial of their sons
because she says it would be as shameful, hazukashime, as handing them
over to an enemy for burial. She then proclaims that instead she herself
will bury them in the earth of a remote shrine (yashiro, a Shinto shrine)
of the queen goddess of high mountains. In Takahashi’s text but not in
Ninagawa’s productions she adds that she will bequeath a matsuri (occasion
for a repeated ritual) to purify the pollution (tsumi). This kind of
ritual, a heorte\ kai tele\ in the Greek (Med. 1382), would sound quite
natural and appropriate in the context to a Japanese audience, inasmuch
as matsuri for the puriﬁcation of the dead are not limited to heroes and
Figure 8. Medea and Children.
28 MAE SMETHURST
are used nowadays as regularly as they were in the past. Matsuri help to
alleviate the crime religiously. And she will go, she says, to live with the
ruler of the capital city nearby happily forever after. She then adds that,
as is ﬁtting, Jason will pay for his evil deeds (her word akugo\ means that
he will have an evil karma). He again calls on the children’s female
onryo\ “hungry ghosts,” which are justly thirsty for blood. She asks what
god would listen to someone (like him) who broke his oath, as was
predicted in the choral ode of the red ribbons. However, in Ninagawa’s
production, Jason again calls on the onryo\ and also on a female god of
justice who is thirsty for blood (a translation of erinys “a fury” [Med.
1389]) to come down on Medea’s head and punish her for murdering the
children.
At this juncture, Ninagawa directs the audience’s attention away
from Medea, the hitokami, to a Medea who is like an avenging spirit of
revenge. In many noh and kabuki plays (for example, in the various
renditions of the tale Do\jo\ji, including the kabuki Musume Do\jo\ji), the
avenging spirit of a jealous or wronged woman is transformed by a change
of costume into a serpent or dragon.46
Members of the audience who
know the traditional legends and stories about angry women would be
bound to think of these spirits, which are essential ingredients of numerous
kabuki and bunraku plays. The difference is that here Medea is
transported by rather than turned into a serpent or dragon ﬂying over
Jason’s head as he crouches on the ground below her, beating his breast
and weeping like a defenseless woman. So he was all wrong when he
threatened her with the onryo\ of the children ﬂying over her head (the
words “ﬂying over the head” are not in the Greek). Medea, played in the
style of an onnagata (the type of actor conventionally chosen to play the
role of avenging spirits rather than the male hitokami), is triumphant in
her revenge. No avenging spirit will haunt her. By bringing the onryo\ of
the children to haunt Jason,she has the last laugh.(Arashi actually laughs.)
Ninagawa claims that in his productions of the Medea he did not
46
In Modori bashi (Modori Bridge), another dance drama, a woman changes into a
demon and performs a battle scene; in the noh Aoi no Ue (Aoi no Ue is a woman’s name),
a jealous Rokujo is the demon. There is a whole mythology connected with these women.
On the one hand, females are considered evil; on the other hand, since Buddhism was
thought able to transform evil into good, women, on the condition that they are ﬁrst
transformed into another being, can be saved. In some versions of the Do\jo\ji story the
woman does receive enlightenment; in others she does not. When Medea says to her
children that they will enjoy happiness somewhere else, bettsu no tokoro “a separate place”
in the Japanese (a translation of ekei “there” in the Greek at line 1073), Takahashi introduces
the possibility that the children and she are granted enlightenment in Nirvana.
29NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
want to shock his audiences or cause the consternation that matricide
entails, and he explains that he lightened the heavily charged, emotional
burden of the murders not only with the ﬂying machine, but also by using
dolls (Ninagawa 1989, 132). As one can see, he created children who
appear doll-like; they have a pierrot quality about them and wear white,
not the color customarily worn by real or kabuki children, but a color
that in kabuki signiﬁes either death or divinity. Then, in a commonly
employed kabuki technique, Ninagawa also uses dolls in place of the
child actors for the corpses (he uses a doll as a baby for Medea to hold
during her heart-rending monologue before she kills the children). This
strategy disembodies the children and directs the audience’s attention
away from the deed. The dolls are very small and have red ribbons
hanging down from them; the dragons drawing the chariot now signify
blood. Ninagawa said that his decision to present the children in this way
was connected in part with the fact that a male actor plays Medea’s role
and, therefore, unlike a real woman, he cannot be a mother. On the other
Figure 9. Medea, sword in hand, enters the
palace.
30 MAE SMETHURST
hand, he said that his choice to use live actors as children before the
murder was tied to Jason’s love for them. He directed Tsuchi Kurahiko,
the actor playing Jason, to express intense grief to the fullest of his acting
ability (Ninagawa 1989, 132). Jason’s interaction with the children earlier
and his emotion at the ﬁnale increase the effect of his loss; the use of
dolls lightens the effect of the act itself.
Medea’s ﬁnal laugh is important in this regard. It recalls the earlier
laugh accompanying Medea’s ﬁrst mie pose, in which Arashi, as onnagata,
assumes the stance of a tachiyaku, a male role portrayer, but gives out a
laugh (as here, where Medea is both a male and a female spirit) that
sounds almost exactly like the laugh of a bunraku narrator, the gidayu,
who laughs for the puppets who do not have life, and therefore no voices.
(Medea’s ﬁnal emotional outburst before murdering her children similarly
replicated cries in the voice of the gidayu.) In the West we see actors
playing actors who play characters, or actors playing characters who play
actors. In Ninagawa’s production Arashi assumes the voice of a narrator
for himself, that is, he plays the narrator speaking for a nonspeaking
kabuki actor who, like a puppet, plays the character of Medea. This is a
clear inversion/subversion of a kabuki and bunraku technique, which
creates moments in the production that only those familiar with these
two theaters will notice for the theatrical effects. Ninagawa represents
Medea’s barrenness, not only with the removal of the kimono and attached
breasts and with the use of dolls in place of living children, but
also with Arashi’s voice. When Medea cries, and at the end when she
laughs at Jason, Arashi is no longer acting as an onnagata or a male actor;
with a brilliant stroke of genius Ninagawa transforms his voice to a voice
from outside, which objectiﬁes the shock of the murder. Medea’s laugh is
not the laugh of bunraku in the Athenian production; it is clearly that of
a Western-trained actor.
After Medea’s exit, the music continues playing,47
and Jason calls
upon the gods in the heavens and other gods to hear the words of the
lioness murderer. He grieves for the helpless children, himself unable to
do anything for them, and then adds a sentence that is not in the Greek
text: “I want to tear off my robe down to my breasts, put ashes on my
head, and weep to the limits of my voice.” Ninagawa assigns Jason the
role of a female mourner in a Greek tragedy and furthermore, directs
him to weep at the end of the scene in the style of the narrator of
bunraku, again the gidayu, just as Medea had done in her cries and her
47
Ninagawa mistakenly describes the music as being like that of Handel (1989, 196).
31NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
Figure10.MedeaintheFinale.
32 MAE SMETHURST
last laugh. Both she and he, because they use the voice of the gidayu, like
the children, are thus turned into puppets.48
They are all on an equal
footing and judged by the audience not as part of the world of spirits but
as dolls in a bunraku or kabuki production. Ninagawa’s goal in his
Medea—to effect a katarushisu—is complete. He explains that he wanted
his audience to be engrossed in the performance within the ﬁrst three
minutes and to feel for at least three minutes after the end of play two
things: ﬁrst, as a group, a sense of anarchy (his word) and, as individuals,
a resolute sense of self, as was not the social norm for women in Japan in
1993 (Ninagawa 1989, 132).
With the baroque music still playing in the background49
the Medea
ends, with a coda spoken by the chorus to the accompaniment of their
tsugaru shamisen. In this blended musical ﬁnale, the chorus speak about
the ways of the gods—what the gods accomplish is not expected, what
one thinks will occur does not.The play ends with the words of Euripides,
not with those of kabuki. But the shamisen increases in volume and
gradually drowns out the sound of Western music until only the shamisen
music remains to accompany the chorus offstage—music from the Japanese
instrument, in a Japanese musical idiom, in the presence of a predominantly
Japanese audience.50
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
e-mail: msmet@pitt.edu
48
The movements and speech of the kabuki actors are often based on the technique
of the bunraku theater, and the gidayu is used as an accompaniment and in some cases as
a voice. See, for example, the play Sakaya, outlined in Scott 1955, 249–54. In the kabuki
Ayatsuri Sambaso\ (Puppet Sambaso\), Sambaso dances as if he were a puppet on a string.
See Gunji and Yoshida 1987, 115–16.
49
This music was heard near the end of the scene in which Medea rejects Jason, in
the scene when she decides to kill her children and removes her headdress and outer robe
and then removes her breasts and yellow gown, at the end of the scene in which the chorus
addresses the wonders of Athens, and in the scene in which Medea enters the house to kill
her children and the chorus cry to the Sun for help.
50
The Athens production, which was much shorter than the one in Tokyo, depended
on Hira’s Western-style acting played against the“exotic” Japanese elements for its success.
An analysis of that production, which unfortunately I did not see except on videotape,
would yield a different side to Ninagawa’s directing skills than I have presented here.
However, my occasional references to that production should indicate his extraordinary
ability to read his audiences between the years 1966 and 1988.
This article was published in slightly different form in Hall 2000, 190–261, and
presented in abbreviated form at the American Philological Association meeting in San
Diego, January 2000. It is reprinted in this expanded and revised version with the permis-
33NINAGAWA’S PRODUCTION OF EURIPIDES’ MEDEA
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