Radar L.A. Review: 'Shun-kin' at UCLA
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Complicite and Setagaya Public Theatre perform "Shun-kin" at UCLA's Freud Playhouse. Photo by Sarah Ainslie at the Barbican, London
To find love, we must imagine, we must believe. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched,” Helen Keller once said, “they must be felt with the heart.” Love, in many ways, is one of these things. Its beauty lies in what we make it, in how we choose to see it, in how we choose to define it.
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“Shun-kin,” the latest production from Complicite and director Simon McBurney, chooses to see beauty in shadows and in darkness. Set in 19th century Japan, McBurney uses a daring combination of Bunraku puppetry, dramatic performance, traditional music and innovative scenic design to tell the story of Shun-kin (Eri Fukatsu and Junko Uchida), a blind shamisan player, and her devoted student Sasuke (Songha and Yoshi Oida). It’s a tale that, according to its synopsis, shows just “how close beauty and violence can be.”
It is an uncomfortable examination into the sadomasochistic relationship that blooms between a domineering mistress and her faithful servant—a relationship that, to the naked eye, seems to be defined by cruelty and abuse. Yet McBurney seems to suggest that their love, although not visibly apparent, is touched upon by a transcendental level of sacrifice that, in the end, achieves rare beauty all on its own. Theirs is a love that needs not be seen. Theirs is a love that is entirely possible, even in a time when “darkness” held an important place in people’s lives.
Adapted from Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 novella “A Portrait of Shun-kin,” the philosophy of the production stems from another one of Tanizaki’s works from the same year, “In Praise of Shadows,” an essay about Japanese aesthetics and the appreciation it has for shadow and subtlety.
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McBurney creates an immensely interior world: in dark rooms, violent couplings and brutal moments of mutilation are seen through thin paper screens and the dim glow of half-lit candles. Huge swathes of black also fill the stage, broken up by distinct areas of sharp contrasting light. The stage becomes a dangerous space where twisted desires are free to flow about.
Subtlety of course, is also stressed. With the help of his expert creative team, McBurney emphasizes the use of low-tech illusions that become all the more poetic because of their simplicity: fluttering sheets of paper turn poetically into flocks of larks. The birth of a baby is suggested simply through sound effects and the unfolding of a kimono. The movement of trees is mimicked by the bending over of actors holding tall wooden poles. From beginning to end, the aesthetic inspiration of Tanizaki’s essay is apparent in the exquisite stagecraft, effortlessly transferring us to a place where beauty and savagery walk hand in hand.
The true power of this production, however, comes in the innovative way it chooses to portray its title character Shun-kin, the blind aristocrat whose exquisite beauty is matched by her incredible musical talents. To Sasuke, Shun-kin is more of an idol than a human being—a superior figure who ignites his most passionate of desires.
There is a social distance between them, which McBurney brilliantly reinforces by having the young Shun-kin “acted” by a doll reminiscent of Bunraku. In the eyes of Sasuke, his mistress is an object of worship, an otherworldly deity. Every one of her movements is courtly and serves a purpose. Like the flawless puppet itself, Shun-kin is an extraordinary woman, an exceptional walking and talking work of art.
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To add to the intensity and complexity of the character, Shun-kin has multiple configurations within the play. As a child, she is voice by Fukatsu, whose chirpy voice can impressively change from delightful giggling to vicious hollering in a matter of seconds. Along with the help of Uchida (who subtly moves into the role of Shun-kin as a masked young woman) and puppeteer Yasuyo Mochizuki, Fukatsu manipulates the doll-like movements of a life-size Bunraku puppet with absolute diligence and grace. Their moves are precise, as fluid as those of a puppet—enhancing only further the humanlike but still inhuman elegance of the show’s title character.
With inventive and well-paced storytelling, McBurney and his awe-inspiring all Japanese cast of ten manage to take full control of the stage despite the inability of Tanizaki’s perverse narrative to “progress” properly. Various layers of narration are weaved intricately together—including those of an elderly Sasuke (Yoshi Oida) questioning the murky details of his youth, a modern-day woman (Ryoko Tateishi) narrating the story for a Japanese radio station and Tanizaki (Kentaro Mizuki) penning a letter to a woman he cannot have—to produce a rich tapestry of interwoven voices going back and forth between present and past to further exhibit the complex and convoluted relationship of a mistress and her servant.
“It’s a play of actions. The same actions. Over and over,” McBurney writes in his note to the audience. “Leading. Washing. Dressing. Cleaning. Obeying. Ordering. Time passes. Time wears. The faults begin to show. And then, only then when the worst can happen […] is the real beauty and intensity of [their] relationship revealed.”
In more ways than one, the love of Shun-kin and Sasuke cannot be ‘seen.’ Yet the most beautiful things in life, as we have learned from Keller, often cannot be seen (or even touched). They are unclear and entirely unknown. Their beauty lies in this uncertainty, this ambiguity. “The quality we call beauty must always grow from the realities of life,” Tanizaki wrote nearly 80 years ago.
Nothing is clear when it comes to love. Yet without love, nothing can ever be clear.
More coverage of the Radar L.A. Festival 2013 can be found here.
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