Wednesday, September 9th, 2009...3:03 am
Theatre: Rashomon (truth beholds)
First comes the novel.
Written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, famously regarded as the ‘Father of Japanes Short Stories’, Rashomon is a classic tale on the subjectivity of truth via perspectives, and raise big questions on issues like justice and whether a singular truth can exist meaningfully. (coins the term ‘Rashomon effect’)
A short intro:
A bandit, woken by a breeze while napping in the bamboo grove caught sight of a travelling Samurai and his wife decided to have the woman. The subsequent strings of events deviated depending on who’s reporting the so-called facts.
The Film:
The black-and-white film version won numerous awards, including the Academy Honorary Award for Akira Kurosawa. The Samurai, killed in the bamboo grove gave his testimony via the medium, which directly contradicted what the wife and the bandit said. The deeper irony lies not so much in who kills the samurai but why everyone is admitting to the killing!
On stage:
The stage adaptation put forth by The Theatre Practice’s Kuo Jing Hong capitalises on her strength as a movement based artist, though critiqued by many as been slow paced. It is nevertheless one of the most visually stunning piece of theatre I have seen in a while.
The mis-en-scene is smashingly stunning. i actually do believe that i am caught within the webs of a murder mystery occuring in a bamboo forest with glimpses of the various perspectives of a heinous crime. The marriage of the sounds, lights and sets is mesmerising and completed, in my opinion, all the imagination necessary to steep oneself into the drama, leaving one’s emotional and mental faculties free to indulge in the drama so poignant and heightened by the deliberate slowness, peppered occasionally by lines that exist solely to propel the plot forward. Without words to redeem them, the actors have to tap deeper within to deliver a drama that can transcend languages.
On a whole, Rashomon delivers visually and asethetically. It is pretty enough to please the eyes and deep enough to satisfy my personal demand on theatre. Having listened to sounds rather than words can be rather tiring but blabbers can become noise. Here, every single word counts. The audience members drink them all in. There are parts between the Medium and the Woodcutter that is composed solely of movements and gutteral sounds which is strange to me, and remains inconclusive.
2 Comments
September 11th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Hi Jo.
My guess on the strange exchange was to perhaps invoke the woodcutter’s “not human, not ghost” being :
An essence composed of part anguish, part sadness and part guilt that lingered on for a hundred years?
A symbol of purgatory for the spirits? The grove being the prison in limbo. The woodcutter a poor passerby who was drawn into and lost in their hundred year old suffering?
Just a mechanism to challenge the audience’s own imagination?
To portray that, after being denied of his role in the original story, he has become somewhat of a husk… an entity with incoherent needs of its own?
Although the sword, which appears to symbolize the truth, was deemed initially to be the key to the spirit’s freedom, the medium decided that whose account is correct did not matter anymore: “its already been a hundred years … just let go.”
An interesting thought crossed my mind as I recall something on immaterialism I read a while back :
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
So if we apply rashomonism to it, if no one believes your account, did you actually do it?
I guess most people mistake a bad memory with a clear conscience….
Cheers, and thanks for letting us watch the play.
September 12th, 2009 at 9:00 am
yo cliff,
thanks for sharing your insights! I really like them.
My opinion of the woodcutter’s role remains intact- he does not add to the story in this screen adaptation. His role is inconsequential, as opposed to the film version where the woodcutter is afforded his point of view. Since he has no apparent vested interest in the story, his view becomes more believeable. Whether as a symbol of purgatory or as a unwitting addition to the plot to challenge the imaginations of the audience members, his story runs in parallel to the main plot and then dangles off.
The sword remains for me a symbol of undefeated righteousness for a truth that can never be known, since Rashomon never means to seek the truth (a futile event?).
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