When I first entered the auditorium, I was struck by the very simple setup on the proscenium stage. The backdrop was that of the lobby of a gallery, though upon observing the props, I did not at first realised that the wood lattices hanging at the back were meant to represent paintings. Nor did I quite see the brochure and postcard rack at the far right of the stage, as my view was blocked by some panels.
Before the play started properly, what was to come was hinted on when I saw some of the actors wandering on the stage. Of course, I did not at first thought that they were actors, assuming as I did that they might be members of the audience who wanted to a closer view of the stage. Apparently they were the cast.
We were advised to sit near to the left or right if we wanted to view the English subtitles, and nearer to the middle for the Malay subtitles. However, I tried not to spend too much time following the conversation on the screens, but to actually skip the verbal message for the body language and expressions of the actors. It's a pity that I do not understand Japanese, but then, I haven't got time to pick up that language at this point. But, when the acting is done well, it does not matter that you do not understand the language.
Tokyo Notes
The time was 2014, in Tokyo. It was wartime in Europe (100 years from 1914, the period of WW1) A bunch of people have come to the gallery to look at the surviving paintings of Vermeer, and the conversations that followed among the characters took their point of departure from the exhibition, and even from aspects of Vermeer's paintings. The characters consisted of family members who decided on a reunion at the gallery when their out-of-town art-loving eldest sister came for a visit. While the characters were smiling and laughing with one another, one could see, from their taut faces, the visible tensions. As I did not buy the script, which was on sale at the door, I do not have the names of all the characters. Then, there were also lovers who decided to visit the gallery's exhibition together, as well as former lovers who met by accident at the gallery. The director and playwright, Oriza Hirta, tried to make the play as naturalistic as possible, so much so that one hears parallel conversations going on, though, but rather well-done, to me at least, in that I did not get confused in all concatenation. That despite having to rely in the screen, which is not very reader-friendly when there were multiple conversations going on. I must say that Hirata had superbly designed the conversations to fade in and fade out whenever one group reaches a climax in their dialogue, or if there is an important point that requires the full-audience attention.
The out-of-town eldest sister, Yumi, was with her sister-in-law (whose name escapes me now), and they were conversing quite plesantly. After each set of dialogue, they will be moving out of the stage (presumably to other areas of the exhibits) and other characters will be coming, or, if they were already there, take centre-stage. But as the dialogues between these two sisters related-by-marriage progresses, the audience soon came to realise that, despite the warm family banter, all was not quite right between the sister-in-law and Yumi's brother, Yoshi, who was the husband. As Yumi narrated to her sister-in-law Yoshi's childhood difficulties and phobias, it slowly emerged that Yoshi and his wife,that sister-in-law, would soon be getting a divorce. One less familiar with the Japanese culture will wonder why the women were smiling and giggling as they talk to each other, even about a subject as painful as that. But it is about maintaining a happy (steely) front, however pained you are on the inside. This is especially so for women in a predominantly patriarchal society, and you can see aspects of that emerging via the conversations of the women, as well as the body language. The women seemed to have the attitude of deferring to the men in their lives, be they the husband, lawyer, brother, or lover. The woman is the one who usually makes the sacrifice (in this play). Yumi sacrificed a potential career in the art to be at home for the parents as the rest of her siblings move away to Tokyo to pursue their individual careers and lives. A number of the female characters tend to walk a few paces behind their lovers (and it seems, even today, many Japanese women still have the tendency to do that, particularly those who had never been abroad). Even in the most relaxed relationship, one can see the man taking the lead.
Before the play started, the audience was introduced to the Vermeer's painting of "The Milkmaid" via a projection screen. There was also the "Girl with a pearl earring",a girl reading a book and some other paintings. In each groupings of characters, the audience is confronted with discussions on how the subjects in Vermeer's paintings seem to be always facing the window. There was an instance when one of the art gallery subject specialist explained the concept of the camera obscura to Yumi, and how Vermeer had utilised that in his paintings. The concept of light and shadow in the paintings, as explained by curator-character, is, in a way, an important theme in the play. It is projected through the different layers of the play. In the first instance, it can be a binary imagery for the known vs the unknown, the seen versus the hidden. This is illustrated by the dialogue between the characters. As the night progresses, the audience was treated to a slow unravelling of some of the characters' personalities, though inevitably, there would be a few that are a close book to us, because they were not central enough to the play, though still integral. Marriage, love, humanity, estrangement.
It is perhaps important to point out how the men tend to be rather philosophical in their outlook, whereas the women were more practical, though there were instances when a woman or two become pensive. While not all the characters were art-lovers, they were there because someone close to them was an art-lover and they were accompanying that person. But, since they were already there, they decided to take a look at the paintings, particularly the latest exhibits, and one of them, a man who was mostly sitting alone as his friend/lover (we do not know which, since the little we get is from the conversation between that man and another character) went around the gallery on her own. But he too learnt to appreciate Vermeer, when feeling bored, decided to take a look himself.
It was at the gallery that he encoutered a former student with whom he had had an affair. The tension and awkwardness between the two of them can be clearly felt during their conversation. There was a kind of "talking-around-the-issue", or talking at, instead of each other, betwen these two characters. A veiled suggestion on how he might had ruined the young girl's life, though this was quickly squashed by the girl-s turn-about remark, so one is never sure. From the dialogue, we knew that he was married, but was out with another woman. There might be, or no, special intimacy between him and the woman he is accompanying. Or he might be lying about her relationship to him. But like the interplay of subject and light in the paintings, the audience will be wondering about that hidden shadow, the unsaid and the unrevealed aspects of the character and his/her individual stories. What is palpable is that, many of the characters have issues to deal with, be it a long-distance relationship caused by the other serving at the war in Europe, or a torn marriage caused by another's change-of-heart, cynicism caused by lost of faith, and a feeling of bereftness due to having come from a broken family. We are similarly introduced to a couple whose marriage is about to break-up, though they have a 3 year old son. And a girl, the heiress, who never knew her dad until just the week before he died, when she was told of her inheritance. There were two young man who had seen active service and had came back, and another who wants to be conscripted into service. There is an underlying fear, or even threat, of Japan being drawn into the war, if she does not actively resist it. Hence, the conscription of some of these young men becomes a metonymy to irony.
Mr Konimatae, the gallery's subject specialist, and also former peace movement activist, has moments of melancholy when he becomes philosophic. And in one of these moments, he gave the lawyer-character a rather pessimistic view of the world (his exact words I forget), but was enough to discomfit the young lawyer. The lawyer was employed by one of the characters to work out the papers pertaining to the donation of some paintings that she had inherited upon her father's death. What had initially started as a veiled suggestion for the lawyer to convince the girl to donate all the paintings in her collection turned into philosophical outpourings that stumped the lawyer, slightly.
Anyway, this is not meant to be a professional review, but some notes to myself, and perhaps a story to my readers, of my impression of the play I've seen. The cast had successfully conveyed the myriad feelings of their characters, and the Japanese culture, just from their very expressive use of the body language. This is also a critique to that particular form of modernity that Japan has fallen under, one that breeds isolation and alienation between individuals and family members, that emphasises the material and the far distant war in another continent which only occasionally enters the conscious mind of these characters. While the other characters who are not family members are also building blocks to the story and serve to reinforce the theme outlined by the play, it is the family characters that are the central quincux, on which the story hinges. As it is now 4 am in the morning, forgive me if I do not sound very coherent. (:
I leave with this thought from the director himself that aptly sums up how the play has been like for me.
As its title implies, I got an [sic] idea for "Tokyo Notes" from Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece "Tokyo Monogatari" (Tokyo Story). Where in Ozu's film the old parents visiting their children are delineated scene after scene, "Tokyo Notes" depicts the siblings, now living separately in Tokyo, gathering in the lobby of an art museum in Tokyo when their art-loving sister living in their hometown comes to visit. Naturally, each of them has his/her own life and pains but now their only common interest is who takes care of the parents. As another background, it is suggested that a major war is going on far away in Europe. But the people gathered here look so unrelated to the great global shift, concerned only about their own lives and problems.
If theatre is a device to depict the vibrations of human minds, this piece may have been an attempt to reveal the minutest of such vibrations. I hope to present to the audience what vibrates quietly in the double chaos of the enormous conflict between nations and that in a family, the smallest unit of people in the 90's.
And from the programme notes
Hirata claims that modern theatre in Japan which started out by importing Western modern theater has also lead to playwriting governed by Western logic. Thus, he believes, writing styles and logical structures irrelevant to the Japanese language have been routine practiced, and in trying to give those irrelevant styles reality the actors have been forced into distroted acting styles too. This is the heat of Hirata's criticism of the conventional Japanese Theater
Instead of ostentatious ideas and tricks, Seinendan chooses a clear and firm theory to create the production in order to establish a new expression that can alter the framework of theater itself.
Now, this is something I would like to explore too, with regards to this region's traditional work of art and literature (or should I say, intellectual history?) But this is in another posting. (:
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