Master class Jon Ronson

Yesterday the year 12 and 13 media students and year 12 theatre studies students met Jon Ronson the writer and Journalist (see interview below). It was fascinating to see how productions are developed and the process of optioning a book to be made into a film. We also discussed the ethics of journalism ie. what is printed from interviews especially if the writer thinks the interviewee has made a mistake in expressing that view. Should he go ahead and print. It provoked a healthy debate. His stories were highly entertaining and thought provoking and the students found the whole experience exciting and fascinating. A big thanks to Jon Ronson for giving his time.

Jon Ronson master class

About Jon Ronson
AN INTERVIEW WITH JON RONSON FROM THE WEBSITE 'THE WOLFMAN KNEW MY FATHER'

As a youth growing up in Cardiff, culturally what were your interests?

Jon Ronson: Chapter Arts Center. I remember seeing a double bill of Woody Allen's Zelig and Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy at Chapter. I remember that better than pretty much anything that actually happened to me. Yes, the things I remember most clearly from my childhood are things I watched and listened to rather than things I experienced. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Spillers Records, where I first heard Captain Beefheart. Listening to Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones at Bill Davies' house in Roath Park during the Cardiff High School lunch-breaks. Reading Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse 5. Sirens of Titan was heartbreaking to me, especially the plight of the jellyfish type animals that lived in the caves beneath Mercury. Seeing The Specials at Sophia Gardens before it fell down in the snow.
I used to go to the Sherman Theatre too. In fact when I was sixteen I somehow landed a part in Death of a Salesman at The Sherman. I played Henry, the next-door neighbour's son. The only line I remember is, "What happened in Boston, Willy?" I don't remember what happened in Boston, but I think it had something to do with shoes.
Other than that, I just hung around amusement arcades (on Caroline Street and Queen Street) with a boy called Dick Johns. I was a hoodie, although I had no hood. Dick and I were obsessed with David Bowie. We used to walk down Cyncoed Road singing Five Years and Rock & Roll Suicide. Non Sadler (who died when she was about 22) introduced me to Lou Reed's Transformer, also on Cyncoed Road. Dick and I and Bethan Morgan used to go busking. I learnt how to play the keyboards.

Did they force you to play rugby in school?

Jon Ronson: Oh God, yes. I was a prop. There was frost on the ground. Prop. Frost.
As I answer these questions I am feeling waves of melancholic nostalgia, which I think is a sign of getting old.

How on earth did you end up in the Frank Sidebottom band?

Jon Ronson: Well, when I left Cardiff I went to study journalism at the Polytechnic of Central London. When I was 20 I became the the entertainments manager for the Student's Union, and somehow I became friendly - over the phone - with Frank Sidebottom's manager, Mike Doherty. One day Mike phoned me up in a panic and said, "We're playing a gig in London tonight and Mark Radcliffe (who was the keyboard player at the time) has had to drop out. Do you know any keyboard players?"
I said, "I can play the keyboards."
He said, "Well, you're in!"
I said, "I don't know any of the songs."
He said, "Can you play C, F and G?"
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Well, you're in!"
So I turned up at the Cricketer's in The Oval, and I told Frank Sidebottom that I was slightly worried because I didn't know any of the songs. Frank said, "Do you know C,F and G?"
I said, "Yes."
Frank said, "Well, you'll be okay then."
They put me behind the speaker-stack and turned my keyboard right down, and when Frank introduced the band at the end, nobody cheered me because nobody knew I was there.
Anyway, for some reason they asked me to continue with the band, and I did, for about three years. In fact I dropped out of college to move to Manchester and become a member of the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey! Big Band. Life on the road was a more glamorous prospect than journalism studies. We supported Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the Town and Country Club. It is not easy to describe Frank Sidebottom to readers who are not familiar with his oeuvre. Could you provide a picture?

Chris Evans was our driver, briefly. We used to drive around in a transit van. One time we were playing in London and we pulled up on Edgware Road and the driver - I can't remember if it was Chris Evans - wound down the window and said, "Excuse, mate?"
"Yeah?" said a passer-by.
"Is this London?" said the driver.
"Yeah," said the passer-by.
"Well, where do you want this wood?" said the driver.
My favourite Sidebottom story was when he supported Gary Glitter at some Student Freshers' Ball. Gary Glitter's people were really rude. "You haven't got a dressing room. You can't drink any of our beer. You aren't allowed to use our lights. Whatever happens don't go anywhere near the hydraulic floor."
And so, as soon as Frank went on stage, he jumped onto the hydraulic floor and started singing: "Come On! Come On! Do you want to be in my gang...?" And the floor rose, setting off various fireworks and smoke bombs, and floated out towards the audience. After the show, Frank jumped off stage and ran down the corridor, chased by Gary Glitter's bouncers. Frank took off his head and costume - he had his own clothes underneath - just as the bouncers caught up.
"Did you see Frank Sidebottom?" they asked him.
"He went that way," said Frank.

How much of a grounding for your later books and documentaries was your Time Out column? (I seem to recall lots of new age madness and eccentric behaviour in those pieces).

Jon Ronson: There was indeed much madness in those columns, but I wouldn't say that they had any relation to the later books. When I was a Time Out columnist I was only 23 or 24, and really I hadn't found my voice. I was just copying Victor Lewis-Smith and PJ O'Rourke. I only really worked out how to write when I wrote Them: Adventures with Extremists.
I got the column, by the way, because when I was in Frank's band I started presenting a late night radio show on KFM in Stockport. I co-presented with Craig Cash, who went on to create and act in Early Doors and The Royle Family. Those were happy times. But then we got sacked, and there was a 'Reinstate Craig Cash and Jon Ronson' campaign in the Manchester media. This somehow got the attention of Time Out in London, and they offered me a column. I never got reinstated though.
Craig Cash still calls me from time to time. When The Royle Family was nominated for a BAFTA, Craig left a message on my answer-phone: "Ronno! It's Craig. Am I going to see you at the BAFTAs tonight? Oh no I'm not, am I, because you haven't been nominated again. Poor old Ronno with his face pressed up against the glass."
And when I became a father, Craig left another message on my answer-phone: "Ronno! I've heard you're a father. Congratulations. But you haven't got two BAFTAs on your shelf, have you?"

How did you get your first break in television?

Jon Ronson: It is a strange story. When I was writing my Time Out column, I got a call from my old journalism teacher from the Polytechnic of Central London.
He said, "You should do a TV series. Do you mind if I approach Janet Street Porter?"
I said, "Do you know her?"
He said, "No."
So he wrote to her - I had no idea what he said, I still don't - but the next thing I knew I was in her office at the BBC in White City.
She said, "I think it's a BRILLIANT idea for a series."
I just sat there, because I had no idea what the idea was. I just smiled and nodded.
And the next thing I knew I had been allocated £420,000 to make a six half-hour series for BBC 2.
It was nuts. It is always a mistake to commission a series when one has no idea what the series is.
So I made a series called The Ronson Mission. We basically made it up as we went along. Some of it was terrible. Actually, most of it was terrible. I was just in my mid-20s. I had had no ambition whatsoever to be on TV. It was all quite surreal. There were a few good ideas in there, but I must admit that the Guardian called The Ronson Mission one of the five worst series of Michael Jackson's tenure as controller of BBC2. I didn't enjoy making it, primarily because these were the days before DV cameras, and so there was a huge crew, a van full of us turning up at people's houses trying to replicate reality.
After The Ronson Mission I didn't make any more TV shows for at least three years. I was glad to have it behind me. But then I got a call from one of the series' only fans - a man called Peter Grimsdale who was a commissioning editor at Channel 4. He said he wanted to put me together with a director called Saul Dibb. By now hi-8 cameras had been invented so film-making was much more like writing. the camera was like a notebook. We made a film called New York to California, which was an epic journey from a little village called New York, just outside Norwich, to a caravan site down the road called California. And then we made Tottenham Ayatollah, which was our breakthrough. Tottenham Ayatollah documented our year with Omar Bakri Mohammed, an Islamic militant. That was the beginning of the story that ended with Them.

Which do you prefer - filming or writing?
Jon Ronson: Writing. I am a natural writer, and not a natural director. I have friends - like Adam Curtis, who made The Power of Nightmares, and Saul Dibb, who has gone on to direct Bullet Boy - who are natural directors. They love pictures and sound and pacing. They are aesthetes. I like words.

With regards your presentational style how faux is your naif ? And generally how happy are you with your TV persona?

Jon Ronson: I have only got my TV persona (if it IS a 'persona', that is, I'm not sure that it is a persona) right on a few occasions: Secret Rulers of the World and Tottenham Ayatollah. The rest of the time it hasn't quite worked. Faux Naifery is a delicate art that can get annoying if mishandled. I've been doing a lot of mishandling of late.
I don't know how faux it is. Much of Them is about me trying to track down the Bilderberg Group, who the likes of Omar Bakri and David Icke believe is the shadowy cabal that secretly controls the world.
Now, I could have done a whole lot of research about Bilderberg before I set off to try and track them down. but I didn't want to solve the mystery before I had the adventure, whatever the adventure might be. As it was, I followed them to Portugal with a conspiracy journalist called Big Jim Tucker. I had no idea if Bilderberg existed or if they were just a figment of people's imaginations. There's a passage in Them where we scout around the hotel where this mysterious Bilderberg Group are supposed to be meeting. And afterwards, we start getting followed by men in dark glasses. One of my favourite passages from Them is about this chase. It is the moment when I become the people I'm writing about. Here's the passage:

‘British Embassy.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m a journalist from London. I’m calling you on the road from Sintra to Estoril...’
‘Hold on.’
‘Press office.’
‘I’m a journalist from London,’ I said. ‘I’m calling you on the road from Sintra to Estoril. I’m being tailed, right now, by a dark green Lancia, registration number D4 O28, belonging to the Bilderberg Group.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I just heard you take a sharp breath.’
‘Bilderberg?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They watched us scouting around the Caesar Park Hotel and they’ve been following us ever since. We have now been followed for three hours. I wasn’t sure at first, so I stopped my car on the side of a deserted lane and he stopped his car right in front of us. Can you imagine just how chilling that moment was? This is especially disconcerting because I’m from England and I’m not used to being spied on.’
‘Do you have Bilderberg’s permission to be in Portugal?’ she said. ‘Do they know you’re here?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Bilderberg are very secretive,’ she said. ‘They don’t want people looking into their business. What are you doing here?’
‘I am essentially a humorous journalist,’ I explained. ‘I am a humorous journalist out of my depth. Do you think it might help if we tell them that?’
From the corner of my eye, I saw Jim wind down his window. He leant his head out and blew an antagonising lady-like kiss at the Lancia.
‘Hold on a second,’ I said.
‘Jim!’ I said, sternly. ‘Please stop that.’
I lowered my voice.
‘I’m here with an American,’ I said, ‘called Big Jim Tucker. He’s an agent provocateur. That might be the problem. Perhaps you can phone Bilderberg and explain that I may be in the car with Jim Tucker, but I’m not actually with him.’
‘Listen,’ she said, urgently. ‘Bilderberg is much bigger than we are. We’re very small. We’re just a little embassy. Do you understand? They’re way out of our league. All I can say is go back to your hotel and sit tight.’

(And this is what happened when we got back to the hotel).

Sandra from the British Embassy called me on my mobile phone to inform me that she had spoken to the Bilderberg office at the Caesar Park and they said that nobody was following us and how could they call off someone who didn’t exist?
‘He is,’ I said, in a staccato whisper, ‘behind the tree.’
‘The good news,’ said Sandra, ‘is if you know you’re being followed, they’re probably just trying to intimidate you. The dangerous ones would be those you don’t know are following you.’
But this was scant comfort. What if these men were the dangerous ones, and I happened to be naturally good at spotting them? What if I was adept at this?'

None of this would have happened had I done all my research beforehand. I wouldn't have slid into this world of paranoia. Is that faux naive, genuinely naive, or not naive at all?

For Them: Adventures With Extremists you did actually put yourself in some genuinely scary situations - do you regard yourself as a courageous person?

Jon Ronson: Absolutely not. I am not fearless at all. I just felt I had to go where the story took me, and that included being chased by Bilderberg, and infiltrating Bohemian Grove, that strange secret club where the Bushes and the Cheneys go and have their ceremonies. These things were not fun for me at the time, although I'm now glad that I did it.

Why do you think people like David Icke and Ian Paisley allowed you to get reasonably close to them, given that you have a reputation as a journalist who allows his subjects to make themselves look foolish?

Jon Ronson: It isn't always me who makes the initial approaches. Ian Paisley was approached by a Northern Ireland television producer called David Malone, who secured the access before I was brought into it. I did approach David Icke myself. We'd had a bit of a sore past together, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt. Remember that - by and large, I would say - the people in my stories often come out of it very well. David Icke, Alex Jones, Lt Col. Jim Channon and General Stubblebine (from The Men Who Stare At Goats), even Omar Bakri, I would argue, come out of the stories as human beings, with character traits the reader can identify with. Some of the people I write about come out of it extremely well: The Weaver family, for instance, from Ruby Ridge. They have been demonized for years by the media. Them was really the first time that their story was told.

How did you first learn about the new age influence on the American military that eventually produced The Men Who Stare at Goats?

Jon Ronson: In 1995 the CIA declassified the fact that the Army had a team of psychic spies, and they'd been trying to be psychic for 23 years. They'd been based in a condemned clapboard building down a wooded track in Fort Meade, Maryland. They were Black-Op, nobody knew they existed. Anyway, when the CIA declassified them and closed them down it was such a colourful story nobody wondered whether it was the tip of an even weirder iceberg. In 2001 I met a psychologist called Ray Hyman. Ray had been employed by the CIA to evaluate the psychic program. They knew Ray was a sceptic and would say the program was nonsense. They wanted this conclusion so they could close the unit down. Ray indeed concluded it was nonsense. When I met Ray (in Las Vegas), I asked him if he'd heard of anything else going on, and he said he had some vague notion - he'd heard some rumours that they were trying to teach soldiers how to be invisible and walk through walls. He gave me a few half-remembered names: Channon. Stubblebine. So I clung onto that scant information and followed it, to Channon and Stubblebine, and then onto the War on Terror, where these ideas live on in mutated form.

How has The Men Who Stare at Goats been received outside of Britain, particularly in the States?

Jon Ronson: It has been received very well indeed in the States. Rave reviews in all the major papers.

You've used your family a lot as raw material for your Guardian column. Do they find it disconcerting that casual remarks might end up as part of a humorous anecdote in a national newspaper?

Jon Ronson: No. My wife feels the same way I do about the column - if it works, if it is funny, it is fine. If it isn't funny, it isn't fine. I wrote a short memoir called A Fantastic Life, about taking my son to Lapland to meet Santa, which I think is the best bit of writing I've ever done. It is not exploitative of my son. He is the straight-man in it. I am the idiot. I see the columns as additions to that story. One day they will all come together to form something else. Maybe a film script? Maybe a book?

Have any particular writers or humorists influenced your prose style or approach to writing in general?

Jon Ronson: Oh yes. Kurt Vonnegut. Raymond Carver. I learnt short sentences from them. And nowadays, Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up! This influenced the kinds of subject matter I write about. I love Lynn Barber's journalism. And I am a great fan of an American radio show called This American Life. I contribute to it sometimes. It is full of people who do the kind of things I do - Sarah Vowell, David Sedaris, Ira Glass. William Leith has a brilliant new book coming out called The Hungry Years - a memoir of a compulsive eater.

Finally Jon, you have an excellent website www.jonronson.com with a lively forum but let's be honest, it's like having your own cult. Is there a danger that you might turn into a crazed egomaniac - the kind of person who ends up in one of your own documentaries?

Jon Ronson: Things don't go to people's heads when they get to 37. By the time we get to 37 we are too bowed by the travails of life to become crazed egomaniacs.

Shunkin Review

Reviews for “Shunkin” by Complicité at the Barbican

A few years ago, Simon McBurney and his Complicité company, arguably the only experimental British set-up (troupe is the wrong word) with a genuine international profile, co-operated with the Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo on a revelatory theatrical animation of the stories of Haruki Murakama, The Elephant Vanishes.
Sushi, sushi, listen who dares: Simon McBurney is saying his prayers. And he's convened the same arrangement to unravel the writing of another popular 20th-century Japanese writer, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965), who in 1933 wrote A Portrait of Shunkin, a sadistic love story concerning a 19th-century merchant's daughter and her older apprentice, and a related essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows.
The resulting show, lasting two long hours with no interval, while possessing a quiet and stealthy charm, is not all that big a deal. It's not a patch on The Elephant Vanishes, which bristled with vivacity and invention. Shun-kin proceeds at a single slow pace, with a confused perspective of the narrator living in Osaka in the 1930s who is telling the story, and the ageing lover, Sasuke, who survived Shunkin, blind from birth and disfigured in an attack.
Shunkin's talent is as a master of the shamisen, the Japanese three-stringed lute, played in the shadows by a seated musician, while the narrator reads the story by a desk light on the other side of the stage. This narrator is making a translation of "our" theatre experience into another medium, but this layer is never properly explored, except gratuitously at the end in a blazing exit by the protagonists upstage into the "real" world. I kicked myself with annoyance at this cheap trick.
Although continuously humiliated by Shunkin, Sasuke – I can't tell you who plays what or whom because the programme doesn't – refuses to give up on her and blinds himself, piercing his eyes with pins. As Shunkin is already blind, they could have jointly become sarcastically known as "old four eyes," I suppose, but instead he just tends to her every need, wraps her face in bandages, rests his mouth against her cooling feet, only for her to, well, kick him violently in the teeth.
The show is calmly laid out on a collection of dun-coloured mats, and much the most striking element is the representation of young Shunkin as a half life-size doll – the creation, funnily enough, of Blind Summit Theatre – operated and spoken for by two graceful lady attendants. The whole technique is one of illustrating a story rather than inhabiting it and while this might have a certain aesthetic appeal for some, for others (and me) it just seems dull. Even Brecht's theory of alienation didn't mean you didn't get involved; that was all about critical appreciation.
When the doll becomes a pasty-faced woman, sensuously stripped to the waist and bathed by her ladies, you become interested in her potential as a siren or Scheherazade, but she remains a blank, a collection of words summoned by the narrator and fleshed out as an afterthought.
Oh, and when facial violence is administered, guess what? A stream of red ribbons. Not so much cutting edge as rusty razors, methinks. One can only be grateful we didn't have to watch a river crossing and the subsequent billowing of a lot of blue silk.
________________________________________________________________________
The story comes from the popular Japanese writer Jun’chiro Tanizaki who appeals to our modern fetishes of sexuality and the body, the pleasures and perversions of our real and imagined lives, according to the scholar Stephen Dodd. What appeals, obviously, to McBurney, is the chance to place a chillingly observed relationship in a context of modern fascination.
But unlike in his previous collaboration with this company,
, based on the stories of
,
finds McBurney resisting cultural cross-pollination, concentrating instead on the slow, boring purity of a deliberate presentation owing something to both Noh and Kabuki traditions. The framing device is just that, until the very last moments when the stage is transformed in light.
Director Simon McBurney's love affair with Japan produced a terrific show for Complicite in The Elephant Vanishes, a collaboration with Tokyo's Setagaya Public
. Love, however, proves blind in this latest Complicite piece that combines two works by Jun'ichiro¯ Tanizaki: an essay on aesthetics and shadows, and his 1933 story about the sadomasochistic relationship between a blind woman, Shun-kin, and her servant lover, Sasuke. The latter endures intense mental and physical cruelty before mutilating himself for love. There are clearly cultural differences operating here, because what the Japanese admire as devotion and passion, we would probably call domestic violence and send for the social services.
As you would expect from McBurney, there is plenty in this two hours without interval that is meltingly beautiful; its stillness, the way it plays with light and shadow, and, best of all, the work of the acclaimed puppet company Blind Summit, who magically dissolve the barriers between the wooden-jointed and the human so you cannot tell one from the other. The evening is as delicate as one of Shun-kin's own feet.

By Michael Coveney
By Nobuku Tanaka
"I have absolutely no idea beforehand what exactly I am going to do. Everything comes together really at the last minute," says 50-year-old English dramatist Simon McBurney when asked how he's approaching his latest collaboration. Working with Japanese actors, McBurney is producing "Shunkin," a play based on works by Taisho Era novelist Junichiro Tanizaki (1896-1965), for a world premiere on Feb. 21 at Tokyo's Setagaya Public Theatre (SEPT).
The cofounder of the London-based Complicite theater company, McBurney first worked with SEPT in 2003 on "Elephant Vanishes," a work based on stories by the novelist Haruki Murakami. Whereas "Elephant Vanishes" examined the lonely lives of modern urban dwellers, "Shunkin" looks to the past to tell of a mysterious relationship between Shunkin, a blind koto master, and her servant and lover Sasuke.
McBurney has drawn on Tanizaki's 1933 works "Shunkin Sho (A Portrait of Shunkin)," a short novel, and "In'ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows)," an essay on aesthetics. Fascinated by the works since he first visited Japan, the English director tells The Japan Times what he's learned from them about memory, language and identity.
Why are you so interested in novelist Junichiro Tanizaki's works?
When I first came to Japan in 1995, I did workshops about memory — a topic I was interested in at that time, wondering how it works and about its biochemistry, for example. In 1999, I actually made a play about memory titled "Mnemonic." I started to wonder how different people in different cultures see the past. When I was talking to a friend in Japan about this, he gave me a copy of "In'ei Raisan" by Tanizaki. I discovered it was not just an essay about aesthetics, but also about the ways Japanese writers might meditate on the past.
Meanwhile, I discovered that in our brains, the biochemical reactions involved in memory are exactly the same as those of the imagination. I realized that Tanizaki totally "imagined" the past — he didn't try to say this is how the past was, but he was playing with the idea of the past. This playing with the past is something I am very interested in. In "Shunkin Sho," he pretended he was documenting a real story from the 1850s, and he quoted lines from a bogus book called "Shunkin-den." So, he set up this atmosphere first and then asked himself whether these things really happened or didn't happen — meaning that his novel is Tanizaki's meditation on how he tells a story.
How are you staging "Shunkin"?
For me, it's very important that many young people will come to see this play — not just Tanizaki fans — and that they want to see a new kind of theater. Whatever we do, we and the actors must connect with the people of today. We must not focus on whether the actors' Kansai accents are perfect or not — that would be like English people saying you are not speaking Shakespeare's English quite right. That's not a question for a piece of theater — the question we always ask about a piece of theater is just this: "Is it alive?"
Every day now, I am starting to understand more about the story. It's a very strange process for me as I am trying to understand what's going on in the language (Japanese) as well. Every day we are making discoveries. Then we have to react to what's written and invent something from there.
Why did you choose "Shunkin Sho" from among all of Tanizaki's works?
I often think I shouldn't have, and that I should have chosen something else (laughs). However, sometimes you must set yourself a challenge.
He was creating a new language during a transitional period in history, in the 1930s, when something radical was going on, and I am particularly interested in that period. His usage of multiple writing styles is very modern. He was deliberately meditating on the past, and he's playing with his audiences and shocking them. But also, "Shunkin Sho" is a meditation on the nature of love. Maybe, that's why I chose it.
I quite understand that his writing was a kind of decadent art, or art for art's sake. But he deliberately drew contrasts with the modern world of his time while he meditated on that other world. He also tried to point out the sadism and masochism in the relationship between Shunkin and Sasuke.
There is no cast list yet — have you not decided on the actors?
In the novel, the character of Shunkin is represented in a number of quite complicated and contradictory ways, so she is not presented as being the same here as she is there. She is just not an ideal woman and she is quite unpleasant because she has suffered. Also, descriptions of her come from all sorts of different viewpoints. So it is unlikely that Shunkin will be represented by one actress. Equally, Sasuke must be represented by different-aged actors as the story unfolds. These are among our challenges, and in subsequent stagings of "Shunkin," the approaches may change because theater is a living art.
________________________________________________________________
By Fiona Mountford

Fusing two 1933 works from novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, McBurney and his 10 Japanese performers spirit us far away to the stylised world of shadows that is the 19th century Meiji Era.
There’s ritual elegance, hypnotic wonder and a daunting cultural chasm, as the peculiar story of a sado-masochistic relationship unfolds. Shunkin, blind mistress of stringed instrument the shamisen, takes up with her servant-pupil Sasuke, subjecting him to a life of complicit humiliation and the unlearned in Japanese tradition to no little confusion.
A framing narrative helps us to get more of a handle on the indisputably stylish action, which comes complete with live music and puppetry. A contemporary actor records Tanizaki’s work for radio, and contemplates her own troubled romance in the refracted light from Shunkin/Sasuke. It’s all very intriguing yet ultimately distancing, and the constant focus-pulling battle between the action and the far-away surtitles is no help.



He follows the original in having the tale recounted by a narrator living in Osaka in the 1930s, the real time of the story itself. This woman pores religiously over the text, hunched in a small pool of light, reading the story while the actors mime it in slow motion. For most of the evening of nearly two uninterrupted hours, the blind, sexually sadistic Shunkin is played by a puppet manipulated by two female attendants.
She later emerges, half-naked and alluring, in the shape of an actress whose name I cannot divulge (the programme lists the company without attributing roles), and her puppeteers are still on hand. This transition is one of several beautiful effects; another being the loyal Sasuke’s piercing of his own eyes with pins; another, admittedly hackneyed, the sprouting of red ribbons when Shunkin is facially wounded.
The Elephant VanishesHaruki MurakamaShun-kinShunkin is a master of the shamisen, the Japanese lute-like musical instrument with three strings that is played constantly at the side of the stage while Sasuke graduates from shop boy to lover, apprentice to master himself and keeper of the sacred flame. But an air of suffocating piety hangs over the show, and you long for emotional break-out.
- Michael Coveney


Send for the social services ... Shun-kin. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
But what is missing is the excitement you so often get from a Complicite show, the feeling that you are watching a piece that was made with all synapses firing and blood pumping, something multilayered that makes unexpected connections for both head and heart. This is much more like looking at a strange, beautiful and very expensive object behind glass in a museum. You admire it, but you don't know what it is actually for. Not only does it feel useless, some of the devices utilised - rolling bodies, integration of film and live action, actors playing trees - have been used by McBurney before to better effect. An elusive evening that leaves both director and audience still chasing shadows.
Shun-kin is inspired by two works by one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Written in 1933 when Japan was opening its arms to Western influence, the short story, A Portrait of Shunkin, is a tale of masochistic longing. In the same year, Tanizaki wrote In Praise of Shadows, his essay on Japanese aesthetics.
Both stories were shaped by Tanizaki’s own fantasies and idealisation of a bygone era. Shun-kin moves between the neon glow of Japan and the vanished world of the Meiji era and uncovers moments of light in a world of darkness.
McBurney and Complicite tell a tale of devotion, passion and power, where beauty is unforgiving and love is blinding. Emerging from traditional Japanese culture this powerful production reveals how close beauty and violence can be. Shun-kin is performed by a Japanese cast in Japanese with English surtitles.
Shun-kin has original music by Hidetaro Honjo, design by Merle Hensel and Rumi Matsui, costume design by Christina Cunningham, lighting by Paul Anderson, sound by Gareth Fry, projection design by Finn Ross for Mesmer and puppetry by Blind Summit Theatre.
Under the artistic direction of McBurney, Complicite is one of the world’s leading theatre companies. Its last show, A Disappearing
Number, was seen at the Barbican during bite07 and subsequently won Olivier and Critics’ Circle Drama Awards for Best New Play, as well as the Evening Standard Award for Best Play. Other recent work includes a world tour of Measure for Measure (co-production with the National Theatre) and a revival of A Minute Too Late (National Theatre).
Actor, writer, director and co-founder of Complicite, McBurney has devised, directed and performed in over 30 productions for the company. His other directing credits include Pet Shop Boys meet Eisenstein (Trafalgar Square), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Al Pacino (New York) and All My Sons with Katie Holmes, John Lithgow and Diane Wiest (Broadway).
As an actor, he has appeared in numerous films, among them The Duchess, The Golden Compass, The Last King of Scotland, Friends with Money, Bright Young Things, Eisenstein and Onegin.

Year 7 drama Silent Movies

YEAR 7 DRAMA LESSONS





This term we have been studying silent movies. We started of by watching some Buster Keaton movies so we got the idea of what we were aiming for. We were given a story line to follow. We rehearsed that for a couple weeks and also were allowed to add a bit of our own comical themes. After a few weeks of rehearsal it was time to write the placards, they are crucial in silent movies to explain what’s going on in the scene as there is no sound. On the last week we performed them to the camera, there was some music in the background to give the movie a bit of atmosphere. It was music you would find in a pub in France as most of the scenes were set at a bar/nightclub. Facial expressions are very important in silent movies because there is no communication, so the spectators need to understand what is going on and how the person feels.

Drama is a great opportunity to express your self and be somebody different. When acting you are not your self, you are only the person who you are acting. Acting is something that only looks good if you are enjoying your self whilst doing it.

There are things I would like to do in drama, I would like to do comedy and also comedy plays from a script, and the last thing is scripts in general.



By Calvin Carrier