There's collaboration in the air in Japan's contemporary theater world; collaboration between foreign directors and Japanese actors, directors and producers.
In one of this spring's highlights, at the Setagaya Public Theater, audiences will be able to see "The Elephant Vanishes" -- the result of a dream-team tie-up between Japanese actors and the English director, actor and founder of London's Theatre de Complicite, Simon McBurney. Following that, also at SEPT, there will be an all-male "Hamlet," courtesy of the eminent English dramatist and former artistic director of the West End's Almeida Theatre, Jonathan Kent, and a leading exponent of Japanese traditional theater, Mansai Nomura (SEPT's artistic director). Meanwhile, across the city at downtown Sumida Ward's Theater Project Tokyo, founder-producer Hitoshi Kadoi is continuing tpt's pioneering work with foreign dramatists, this time collaborating on "Die Zeit und das Zimmer (Time and the Room)" with German director Thomas Niehaus.
Collaboration is blossoming, but its roots go back to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when shingeki (new theater), strongly influenced by western cultures, was born and grafted on to traditional theatrical forms such as kabuki and noh. Thereafter, right through to the mid-1950s' shingeki boom, though many foreign plays were presented in Japan by Japanese dramatists groping for appropriate ways to translate and present such material, few outsiders were ever involved.