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.
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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.
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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.