Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – The late Yukio Ninagawa’s legendary MACBETH is an emotionally-charged, gorgeous spectacle

• By drediman
• July 22, 2018
• No Comments

Last night, I took in the late Yukio Ninagawa’s legendary Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which was first staged nearly three decades ago in 1980. The remount that has made its way to New York this weekend at the David H. Koch Theater, courtesy of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival (in previous years, likely to have been presented under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Festival), was the last project undertaken by the auteur theater director before his passing in 2016. Its presentation marks a great opportunity to commemorate the celebrated career of this iconic figure in world theater.

The interesting thing about Ninagawa’s Macbeth is how closely it tracks, scene-by-scene, the Bard’s work. The Eastern culture overlays work surprisingly well, enhancing the Scottish play by adding elements of 16th century Japanese society (Macbeth and Banquo are depicted as samurai warriors) and kabuki theater (the scenes with the three prophetic witches). Stylistically, Ninagawa’s adaptation is poetic, cinematic, and forceful. In person, the production’s famous images of the cherry trees were as haunting as I was hoping, swaying with delicate vitality and surreally showering the stage with their blossoms. For his soundtrack, Ninagawa relies heavily on the same passages from Barber’s Adagio and the Fauré Requiem – perhaps overly so – to help create the emotionally intense soundscape.

The acting from the large company is operatically-sized, bordering on histrionic. Luckily, Shakespeare’s play – as translated by Yushi Odashima (the production is performed in Japanese with English supertitles) – and Ninagawa’s mammoth, visually gorgeous spectacle are able to frame the shouty, heightened emotions without ultimately veering into pure melodramatics. The production places a lot of emphasis on the dark, ambition-fueled relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Here, they’re brought to vivid, blazing life by Masachika Ichimura and Yuko Tanaka, respectively. Their heightened performances, as was the memory of Ninagawa, were greeted with vigorous cheers at the conclusion of the evening.

RECOMMENDED

NINAGAWA’S MACBETH
Off-Broadway, Play
Mostly Mozart Festival at the David H. Koch Theater
2 hours, 45 minutes (with one intermission)
Through July 25