I read Christopher Isherwood’s review in the Times after taking my class to see the stage-play of “Throne of Blood” at BAM last Thursday. What a deeply lazy, inattentive review. I love Kurosawa’s film too, and of course the play couldn’t work with Mifune’s “bat-wing eyebrows,” but surely we can say something about the play itself, rather than wishing we were at home with our Critereon Colletion edition of Kurosawa?
There can be something liberating about foreign language films of Shakespeare, which don’t run the risk of suffocating beneath the hyper-famous soliloquies or too-familiar performances. What my students saw in this play, which retranslates the action and the words back into English, with a few lines in Japanese for flavor, is that it helped make the narrative strange again, in some ways even stranger than the all-Japanese film with subtitles. It asks us what’s left of Shakespeare when the words all change.
As Isherwood offhandedly notes, there were a couple of Shakespearean lines in the play. Asaji, the Lady Macbeth character, said that after they murder the king and assume the throne, “all’s well that ends well.” Another character — Macbeth, I think? — insists that he will have his “pound of flesh.” These may be laugh lines, or reminders of the strangeness of the semi-Shakespearean performance. But I also think they connect to a specific genre in Shakespeare, the “problem comedy” or unresolvable comedy, in which not even the comic miracle of marriage can fully salvage the forces that have erupted onto the stage. That’s true of The Merchant of Venice (as another Times review recently noted) and also of All’s Well. One insight of this flawed but intriguing production of “Throne of Blood” was to remind the audience that it’s true of Macbeth also.
I am actually kind of confused. I would have thought that problem comedies would just apply to the plays that are technically comedies, but Macbeth is a tragedy so I am unsure of what you mean by saying that it connects to a problem comedy. Are you saying that the references to Shakespeare in “Throne of Blood” are comical and clash with the genre of tragedy of Macbeth? Maybe you mean to say that the production inserts the lines for the effect of underlining that even the moments of comicality in the play cannot transform it from a tragedy to a comedy? Marriage is not the resolution in Macbeth, but I do know that there exists comic relief in Macbeth, such as in the scene with the porter. In my opinion, Macbeth is a completely dark play replete with dark forces, and there are barely or no elements of positivity or comedy (apart from the comic relief) in the play. Or are you incorporating the fact that a “problem comedy” does not have to be a comedy or that Macbeth itself is so dark that it cannot be lightened by any elements of comedy?
That is particularly an interesting question that you mention that the production raised, about what there is left of Shakespeare when the lines change. The lines are one of the central elements of what makes a Shakespearean play Shakespearean. Another important element, as I have often written in my papers for you, Dr. Mentz, is that Shakespeare is able to replicate human nature in his plays. So maybe that would be something that is still left in the production if it for the most part follows the structure of the scenes in Macbeth and the actors do a fine job of portraying the characters and constructing the scenes. The plotline would not be an authentic remainder in a retranslated play as Shakespeare based his plots on original sources, in this particular play, an actual historical event. So especially in Macbeth, the storyline would not be credited with the trace of Shakespeare. In this particular case, the production would just be a portrayal of Japan duplicating Scottish history.
And Dr. Mentz, what would you have interpreted as what you saw in the production to be left of Shakespeare when the lines change? For example, did you particularly see the production capture human behavior as Shakespeare is credited to do so.