Mishima: A Double Bill at Oval House Theatre by Stonecrabs.
This a theatre production of Hanjo and Hell Screen on 7.45pm from 16th June to 4th July 2009.
'Never before staged in the United Kingdom in English, Yukio Mishima’s lyrically imaginative modern adaptations of classical Noh drama and Kabuki merge traditional forms of Japanese theatre with 21st century psychology. Past and present, reality and illusion, life and death, love, greed, anger collide in a world where characters are forced to find the poetic within the mundane and love in the most unlikely places.
A Yukio Mishima double bill:
The turbulent life of Yukio Mishima, one of the greatest exponents of Japanese literature, led him to commit harakiri at the age of forty-five. The haunting beauty of his modern classics, Hanjo and Hell Screen, promise an evening of pure and unforgettable delight at the theatre.
Hanjo
Translated by Donald Keene
Directed by Franko Figueiredo
In this bittersweet story of unrequited love, the beautiful Hanako waits at a train station with an opened fan in her arms, peering into the face of every man who alights, only to return each time disappointed to her waiting-room bench...
Hell Screen
Yukio Mishima’s adaptation of Akutagawa’s short story
Directed by Kwong Loke
When Yoshihide is commissioned to paint Hell, he sets about having his sadistic vision recreated before him so that he may paint it with measured strokes... Revealed in a cup of sake with a crimson maple leaf floating on it, his conceit comes with a hellish twist - causing a beautiful maiden to be roasted alive in the inferno of a falling carriage. Such is the price of true art.'
The Oval House Theatre is at 52-54 Kennington Oval, London SE11 5SW.
For more information
Tel: 020 86946472
Email: info@stonecrabs.co.uk
