Two years ago, playwright Shoji Kokami, founder of The Third Stage company in Tokyo, started working with the cutting-edge Bush Theatre in West London on his 1993 play "Trance." One of the prime movers in the 1980s small-scale youth theater movement in Japan, the 48-year-old Kokami decided to approach the overseas production of his play in a way quite different than has been done in the past. Rather than simply bring over the original Japanese production, he produced the play, which is now approaching the end of a monthlong run, with a full British cast.
"We didn't want it to be too specific to any country so we took out any national references that had been in the original or were introduced in the translation," the theater's literary manager Abigail Gonda told The Japan Times during the intermission of a recent performance in London. "We thought the fact that the story could happen anywhere was one of the play's strong points, as there's an estrangement to the modern world here that anyone could relate to."
In the last few years, the staging of Japanese plays overseas has undergone a fundamental change.