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The Avignon Festival 2006 - A Personal Encounter (Part III)Reviews (2)Jacqueline Fletcher visits the 60th Avignon FestivalDateline: 6th August, 2006Gens de Séoul Oriza Hirata is a contemporary Japanese playwright who embodies the nomadic spirit excellently. At the age of 16 he left Japan to travel the world on a bicycle, clocking up 20,000 kilometres and visiting 26 countries. Since then he has written about thirty plays and regularly collaborates with artists in France, Korea, Australia, the US, Ireland and many other countries. The play concerns a Japanese family living in Seoul and is set in 1909, just one year before the Japanese colonised Korea. While it is very reminiscent of a type of light, Chekhovian comedy, the family represent the mercantile classes who move in to establish a commercial centre prior to the formal colonisation process when its incumbent suppression of the native culture and language is set in motion and in this respect they could have been Europeans in Africa or Asia. This is very much a 'slice of life' drama, the action taking place during a late afternoon as the family return home to drink tea. The family seems innocuous enough. They are importers of stationery and life seems to revolve around a shortage of Swiss pencils, the new lavatories and the disappearance of a magician newly arrived from Tokyo. The characters are engaging, and while they seem to be good people, generous and kind to their Korean domestic servants, there is a darker side to their seemingly banal lives. Oriza uses them to express the type of paternalistic attitudes, trivial prejudices and patronising positions that underpin relationships between coloniser and colonised. While nothing really seems to happen during the course of the play, there are hints of the storm clouds brewing which can only be seen from a retrospective viewpoint. For example, the amiable uncle who wonders if the Koreans eat octopus and waters down his brother's whiskey on the sly is involved in clandestine activities that relate to Japanese expansion into Manchuria at the time of the Sino-Russian war. It is the type of performance which is utterly charming but gives one goose bumps. One senses a world about the change and this is reinforced by the staging. The family living room is set on a raised tribune, about two metres high, with the audience on two sides. According to Fisbach:
On the platform is a low table around which the characters kneel to drink tea. The platform and table is split down the centre which allows characters to literally walk through the set on floor level, 'off-stage', creating a surreal effect. The tribune has sloping sides so that the entrances and exits are visible and slow, somewhat reminiscent of Noh theatre. The actors transform into character the second they step onto the stage area. It was a small, confined acting area, in the middle of a much larger 'empty space'. The 'off-stage' space surrounding the tribune is used by the actors wearing tiny white aprons tied around their heads, so that their faces are covered. On the apron front eyes and a mouth have been painted. These 'off-stage' activities entail pasting sheets of paper and painting on screens, sitting on the front row with the audience. The French translation was projected onto the sides of the tribune. The acting was superbly understated and it would have been easy to allow oneself to be entirely drawn into the illusion of reality had the staging not been so unusual, almost sinister at times, a continuous reminder of forces at work beyond the niceties of tea-time. (1) Interview with Irène Filiberti, February 2006, quotes from the programme notes. >> Next page
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