London’s Japanese diaspora is out in force for Hideki Noda’s daring revision of Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, more for the cast, led by actor and member of J-pop group Arashi, Jun Matsumoto, Eita Nagayama (Japanese film Monster), and Masami Nagasawa (action movie Kingdom), I should imagine, than for Dostoyevsky. A young lady in front of me has the largest binoculars I’ve ever seen in the theatre and we’re in the front stalls.
This is my first view of the NODA MAP Company (founded in 1994), and what I take from Noda’s modern kabuki interpretation of a profoundly philosophical nineteenth century Russian masterpiece are his subversive comical inclinations. It doesn't matter if you don't know the novel.
It’s knockabout funny with an underlying message, but we’ll get to that later. “What killed God? Communism and the stock market.” “Harris or Trump” flits by in a second. Somehow, they’ve been inserted into a play about patricide. It’s a Gogolian madhouse—a judge with a gippy tummy from eating oysters…
Love in Action—I’m assuming an ironic title—is a court case that could have popped up out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Tomitaro (Jun Matsumoto) is on trial for killing his dad, Hyodo, the head of the family Karamatsu fireworks business. They are / were in love with the same woman, Grushenka (Masami Nagasawa), a lady of loose morals often found in the geisha houses pole dancing. The music is buoyant pop of the fifties and sixties.
It is a circuitous tale, twisting and tying itself in knots, going over and over the details of the case, as often is the wont in legal matters, in confusing and satirical fashion, allowing for showy stand-up performances.
Some of it is even true to the abbreviated novel, Grushenka (name unchanged), the three brothers, the father. Passionate Dmitri is now Tomitaro, intellectual Ivan is now Iwan (Eita Nagayama), a physicist, and novice monk Alyosha is Ariyoshi (Masami Nagasawa doubling with her Grushenka role). As is Grushenka’s nastiness towards Tomitaro’s fiancée (Nozomi Muraoka).
Naoto Takenaka doubles as Hyodo Karamatsu and prosecutor Kugatachi to huge comic effect—his is a standout performance. Noda also plays two roles in his own production, Katsuzo Shiranui the defence lawyer and the Reverend Father (Zosima in the original), with a twinkle in his eye.
But it's a company work, some twenty-five of them, very much in the Grotowski poor theatre mode. Improbable Theatre’s methods spring to mind: the use of rolls of sticky tape for impromptu scene setting I remember from their production of Satyagraha. Actors as stagehands I’ve seen with the Dmitry Krymov Lab Company (since 2022 settled in New York). Complicite, too: Kathryn Hunter, with whom Noda and Complicite’s Simon McBurney have worked, is in the audience.
There are visual jokes, and musical jokes, and political / historical jokes. “We must not let this be a Russian story but a Japanese one for Japanese people”… Noda keeps us on our toes. Some of it is bonkers, but amongst that slapstick are hidden gems. Nobue Iketani as Mrs Russasky, the wind-up doll of a wife of the Russian consul, white cat in her hands (James Bond anybody?) who spills all the wrong beans, a case in point. Diplomacy in action, Russian and Japanese flags strung together...
Do rivalries still linger after the 1904 Russo-Japanese war? Ambition for land is still to the fore, at least in the Russia of today. The past is never the past. I groan at the ‘Kalinka’ song. Is Love in Action a parody or a caricature of Dostoyevskian intensity, putty in the director’s hands?
And do try to concentrate. Noda goes off on tangents all over the place, bringing so many references and ‘influences’, it seems, just for the sheer silly fun of them, to his Dostoyevskian springboard. Streetcar Named Desire, Madame Butterfly, Erin Brockovich, Witness for the Prosecution, his agile mind knows no bounds. Even Ken Russell pops into my head. Do I hear a game show reference?
But then it gets serious, and more Dr Strangelove. We are in Nagasaki; it is near the end of the Second World War. Iwan has been working on their bomb—his equations are projected all over the stage together with Einstein’s famous E=mc2. A bomb is rolled out, Hiroshima is mentioned and Dostoyevsky’s Ivan’s cynical view of humanity comes to the fore.
Is Tomitaro guilty of his father’s murder? Is he innocent? The law can be bought. Does it matter in the end? The final scene is devastation. Timely philosophy in our sabre-rattling times, as Noda leads a captive audience, anaesthetized and diverted by laughter, to a devastating end. The B29 is a paper plane on a stick.
A fireworks dynasty, selling its powder on the black market, its uranium, which makes plutonium, to any buyer: did Ariyoshi’s Christian church turn a blind eye? Their churches have been devastated, cities lie in ruins, but they can say thank you in Russian—"supersiba" on the surtitles. And black snow. Apocalypse comes, but the final word is hope.
A play that time travels, mixing fact and fiction, takes some unpicking, especially at over two hours with no interval. Love in Action comes to London after a 75-date tour of Tokyo, Kitakyushu and Osaka.
Set design is by Yukio Horio, lighting design by Motoi Hattori and Makoto Kitazawa, costume design Kodue Hibino, music Marihiko Hara, sound design Junko Fujimoto, choreography Shigehiro Ide, projection design Taiki Ueda.