Noda Hideki (playwright)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a page for Noda Hideki, Japanese dramatist. For the race car driver, please see Hideki Noda.
Hideki Noda (野田秀樹 Noda Hideki, born 20 December 1955) is an acclaimed Japanese actor, playwright and theatre director who has written and directed more than forty plays in Japan, as well as working at bringing modern Japanese theatre to an international audience.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Noda was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He briefly attended Tokyo University to study law but dropped out after a time. Noda presented his first play, アイと死を見つめて An Encounter Between Love and Death in his second year of high school. In 1981 he presented his play 野獣降臨 The Advent of the Beast for which he won an award. This was his claim to fame and in 1993, he was invited to perform at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. He also participated in 1990. In 1992 he went to London to study theatre abroad, and when he returned to Japan he started the independent company Noda Map, solely for the purpose of promoting and producing pieces of theatre. He is currently held in high regard within the Japanese theatre community. Japanese theatre director Yukio Ninagawa said of him, “Hideki Noda is the most talented playwright in contemporary Japan.”
[edit] Red Demon
His most notable international work is Red Demon, which he performed in Japan for the first time in 1997 and then in English at the Young Vic Theatre in London in 2003. The major theatre actors involved at that time were Marcello Magni, Tamzin Griffin and Simon MacGregor, with Noda himself playing the Red Demon. This play has also been performed in Thai and Korean. Each version was translated and reworked in an attempt to be most appealing to each specific culture. For example, the Thai version of the play included a lot of music that was never in the original Japanese version, nor was included in the English version.
The story is simply that of a man who is washed up on an isolated island with no means of communicating where he is from. The sheltered islanders mistake him for a demon. The result is a black comedy, the themes of which are of course, tolerance vs. discrimination.
Unfortunately, the English version was attacked by the Japanese media as no longer being Noda Hideki’s work – the translation lost the poetry and nuance that the Japanese work had once boasted. Noda Hideki, while having studied abroad, is not known for his English ability, and had the script translated and rewritten by native English writers Roger Pulvers and Matt Wilkinson.
[edit] Noda’s Characteristics
The notable characteristics of Noda’s plays are thus. First and most well-known in Japan his use of language in terms of limericks and word play. He frequently uses obsolete and old terminology from famous pieces of classical literature as if they were modern-day terms. This helps to create a separate world in which his plays can exist – apart from the reality of the audience. His plays, while often dealing with cliché or everyday topics, try to present the issues in a new way, and his use of old and odd language helps to objectify the play’s theme.
Originally, Noda was interested in revitalizing Japanese theatre and breaking away from the stylised theatre of Noh and Kabuki. His objective was to be as strange and entertaining as possible, touching on modern values, concerns and social issues. This is resulting in a unique and highly stylised visual performance of design and movement. He often takes classical Japanese literature and plays and re-vitalises them in a modern form.
[edit] External links
- (Japanese) NODA MAP
