WESTERN THEATRICAL THEORIES AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE THEATRE

To the valuable examples above gathered from the field of philosophy and science, I would like myself to add another from the field of aesthetics. It is known that one of the characteristics of Eastern culture is aestheticism. We will have now a close look at the theatre.

One of the ever-lasting aspirations of Western theatre is to reach the point where all the arts taking part in the spectacle, music, dance, mimic, decoration (painting and architecture) may be fused in an harmonious unit in order to create what the French call – le theatre total. Since the primitive mystery plays and farces of Middle Ages, rich of a great variety of elements, gave place to a more developed theatre which came until the drama of today, it can be said that Western Theatre, after having experimented a varied and complex number of ways, is still striving without rest to attain the unification of its diverse components. The experiences, after the Elizabethan theatre, in England, after the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and mainly the comedies of Moliére, in France, have been numerous and diversified. This idea of the artistic fusion of the dramatic work comes already from Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, Hoffman and mainly Herder. It was Wagner, the last great tragedian, who has given reality to the ideal of a total theatre. “Dance, music, poetry”, he writes, “are three sisters born with the world!”. From then onwards every great playwright or theatre director has advanced new ideas to the so ardently desired goal.

The great surprise that the theatre of the East reserves to the Western spectator is to show that it can go much further than where all the ambitious theories have pretended to bring the theatre of the Western World.

Let us take as an example the Japanese theatre, which is the most beautiful and richest of the whole East. The art of the Noh is a refined and consummated art where all the elements of the play-poetry, music, dance, mime are fused in a high degree of harmony that attains unsurpassable beauty. This beauty comes from the harmonious unity reached by the actors and musicians.

The accompaniment of musical instruments, the part played by the choir, inserts itself perfectly in the progression of the text; the timing of the dance is fixed according to old, unfailing tradition; the scenic movement, the rhythm and tempo of the acting develops against the background of the old green pine tree which, in its unchanging uniformity, gives to the whole spectacle a timeless quality, as if the flowing of action, as if the symbols of life moved on a plane of eternity. All this seems the ideal achievement of a poetic play. The Japanese must have attained this high degree of scenic art very early, as we can surmise when we read the highly elaborated treaty on the great tradition of Noh by Zeami.

Compared with this richly harmonious theatre, Western scenic art shows itself infinitely poor, when it wants to stage a play of one of its great modern poetic writers: Claudel, Audiberti, in France, or T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, in England. The fact that it escapes the uniformity of the Noh, that it constantly tries to invent new forms in decor, interpretation, etc., might bring it every time anew and more lively, rejuvenated with the freshness of new experiments and new horizons. What has happened however, is that the suggestive power of the word has not yet found the poetic environment where it can find its full resonance, and a poetic play on the Western stage is always a hybrid spectacle, lacking that quality of purity, of harmony achieved through the fusion of all interwoven dissimilar elements which makes the genuine work of art.

But if this is the case with the poetic play, of which the various elements are more in unison on account of its particular scenic form, much more surprising is the analysis of normal dramatic theatre if we compare it with its Japanese correspondent, the Kabuki.

Much less refined than Noh, far from attaining the purity and harmonious unity of Noh, the Kabuki is richer in themes, of movement, and of strong popular inspirations. Its style is not so pure because it has to cover a vast range of subjects, plunging into ordinary life, of which Noh only decants the essence. Nearly all the dramatic episodes of Japanese history and legend have been dramatized in Kabuki: Noh has been kept apart only for the highly poetic adventures of the soul, which can be reduced to these poetry and transformed into a pure constellation of symbols. Notwithstanding this great variety of themes and its artistic wide range, Kabuki has resolved all the aesthetic problems included in its highly complex art.

Again, here the comparison with Western theatre shows the poverty of means of the latter. The West keeps a very rich reserve of classical plays, but has lost its old scenic art, as the multiform Commedia dell’Arte had no following and the popular mystic and festive tradition of the medieval mystery play was lost for a long time. In the West only the modern scene exists today. And in this modern theatre all forms have been tried: The naturalism with Strindberg; Psychological realism with Ibsen; the expressionism from Wedekind to O’Neil; symbolism with Maeterlinck; Max Reinhardt with his ideal of the puppet-actor; the free theatre of Antoine; neo-realism, the present abstract theatre or theatre of the absurd of Ionesco, Beckett and their numerous imitators. All these forms were the expression of new schools and new theories, that followed in succession, one being soon put aside by a more recent one. Probably the formula which went further was the one formulated by Komisarjevsky: the division of the theatre in drama, opera and ballet is purely artificial and enforced, and perfection in theatrical art can only be achieved by a synthetic union of drama, opera and ballet, performed by a universal actor. (1)

Kabuki has, since three centuries, reached this synthesis the Western theatre is still searching. All the forms can exist there simultaneously: it can be realist, symbolist, poetical and bourgeois, with puppet-actors, and even more absurd and freer than the most advanced theatre of the Parisian “avant-garde”,

The immovable poses of the actor when he crosses the Hanamichi, processes like Mie and Kimari answer directly to the theories of Stanislavsky and Craig, and the critical reaction and distantiation that they provoke in the spectator satisfy the theory developed by Brecht in his “Little Organon for the Theatre”. Above all, it is remarkable the way that Kabuki solves the problem of reality and irreality on the scene, the fight between Shajitsu and Shai. (  ) All this makes the Kabuki a real “theatre total”, which found the way to combine harmoniously dance, music, mimic together with acting, within a rich sense of rhythm and colour, a highly developed stylization, a form which embraces all the “genres”, from the tragedy to the comedy, the drama, the farce, the pure ballet and mime.

All these rich advantages have, however, their shortcomings. The themes of the Kabuki are aged. It plunges too much into history. We would like to see debated there the great problems and preoccupations which worry the man of today. I can well understand that, to modernize Kabuki would need probably a genius, as great as Chikamatsu. Because modernity should not suppress its refined stylization, the marvellous fantasy of its conventions, its lively tradition, its wonders, its rich, prodigious absurd. If it could keep all this and yet be able to dramatize today’s life, in a fertile effort of renovation, but without becoming poor, nor taking an arid path through schools and theories, in a ceaseless effort of creation, as has been for centuries now the path of the theatre in the West.

Kabuki owes much to the technique of the puppet theatre, Joruri. Here, again, Western ideas of Theatre can find a full answer to its most ambitious speculations. Gordon Craig would be certainly happy to have invented this most elaborate form of Theatre. Claudel expresses thus his enthusiasm: “The living actor, whatever his talent may be, always bothers us by admitting a foreign element into the part that he is playing, something ephemeral and commonplace; he reminds always a man in disguise. The marionette, on the other hand, has no other life or movement but that which it draws from the action. It comes to life with the story”. “It is not an actor that is speaking; it is a word which acts”. And it is surprising to see that this longing for an absolute Theatre was expressed by the greatest writer for the puppet theatre, Chikamatsu, in words very similar to these of Claudel. “Joruri”, says Chikamatsu, “differs from other forms of fiction in that, since it has primarily to do with puppets, the texts must be alive and filled with actors. The author must impact to lifeless wooden puppets in a variety of emotions and attempt in his way to capture the interest of the audience”. (  )

The Japanese puppet theatre has found, probably better than any other theatrical form, the fundamental problem of combining reality with unreality. The puppets do not move alone, pulled by invisible strings; on the contrary the puppeteers show themselves to the audience and, though his assistants have their faces veiled, the chief puppeteer shows his face and movements. Each puppet is manipulated by three puppeteers. The voice of the puppet is the narrator, who is also conspicuously seen on the stage. The narrator is the main artist, because the word is the soul of the whole spectacle. He speaks the dialogues for the puppets, explains his emotions, comments his actions. His voice is rich and with a wide range of expression, he laughs, sighs, weeps, explodes with rage and indignation; his vocal technique is a mixture of ballad recitative, simple story narration and a singing style which has strong affinities with Buddhist chant. (  )

It is easy to understand why, among these rich forms of traditional theatre, Shingeki, modern theatre, shows so little success in Japan.

Japanese people, having at their disposal the refined and poetical spectacles of the Noh, which is theatre in its pure form, and the Kabuki, with its fantastic world of imagination, colour, movement, drama and harmony, find too drab the poor spectacle of daily life, without music, without dance, without mimic, supported by the simple power of the word - power which, with the exception of rare texts, is weak and deceiving.

We can conclude that in the field of theatre, after having run along separate ways during centuries, West and East have also met together. Thus, in the person of the greatest playwright of our time, Bertold Brecht, Europe finds, for its most up-to-date and revolutionary school, a solution similar to the old one practised in the tradition of the East. The effect of distantiation which is a fundamental principle in Brecht’s theatre, is known from ancient times in Chinese and Japanese theatre. The greatest preoccupation of Brecht is that the actor, when acting, should manifest that he is in what is is doing; in everything that the actor shows to the public must be neat the gesture of showing - “he must show that he is showing something”.

It is curious to approach the “Little Organon for the Theatre”, by Brecht, to the writings of Zeami on the Secret Tradition of Noh.

The precepts of Zeami about the flower (hana), subtle charm (Yugen) and evanescence (    ) which is still superior to the flower, prescribe the same distantiation of the actor; Zeami points out carefully that the actor who plays a madman must show the madness in his face but must not stop a moment to master his art, knowing that he is playing; when he plays a violent part, he must discard every feeling of softness, this is the only means not to be rude. This writes Zeami, in the transmission of the Flower of Acting (Fushi-Kaden), which Brecht certainly never read, though, as he himself expresses, he “copied the Japanese dramatic style”.

Thus, in its last and most remarkable creation, Western theatre comes simply to invent what East has invented six centuries ago. “As far as style is concerned”, says Brecht, “epic theatre presents nothing new. It is akin to the oldest Asiatic theatre, by its explanatory character and by the emphasis on the artistic aspect”.

This coincidence of the most modern ideals of the Western theatre and the old art of Japanese stage is such, that one of the practical recent inventions of the West, the revolving stage, is a device known in the Kabuki theatre since three centuries under the designation of mawari-butai. One can read that, when, a few years ago, Kabuki actors went to the United States and tried to use their old device of the revolving stage, some stage director came and prevented them to do so because he had the patent of this last invention made by himself, registered for America. All this tends to show how some of the most modern ideas reached by Western theatre were found out in the East a long time ago. Thus the approach between the two experiences can complete each other and full the gaps subsisting both in East and West. A mutual deep knowledge of each others experience and resources may spare many dispensable efforts, many attempts without result, and foster a richer art rewarding exploration towards the harmony of so diverse elements.