What an evening! We went to Japan’s Ninagawa Company presentation of Macbeth at the Esplanade Theatre last night. The performance was bursting with mashed up of East and West: samurai era interpretation of Macbeth in modern Japanese language, with “subtitles” in Shakespeare’s texts, names of characters and places in its original form, free flow of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem and Samuel Butler’s Adagio for Strings, and snows of cherry blossom pedals. The stage and sets followed Japanese minimalist feel but were flexible to match different scenes.
I shouldn’t give away too much and, dear readers, you must go watch.
The only unfortunate aspect was Esplanade allowed late comers to enter even over one hour into the show. It was very disrupting to have groups of people walking around throughout the first Act...
I also read a good number of review online and was surprised at how little critics wrote about the music. The choice use of the music was great and fully accentuate the telling of the story. Simply brilliant. The choir that sang the Requiem did it beautifully. Unfortunate the Programme did not acknowledge the source and performers, which I think is not right. I also couldn’t find the information on their company website either. Well, the crew weren’t acknowledged either.
All in all it was a fantastic performance. We really enjoyed it and went back to read Macbeth again this morning. Hope the performers got lots of throat lozenges before tonight’s show because there were a lot of shouting and screaming through out the performance.
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*Disclaimer: This blog was prepared or accomplished by Richard Y. Chen in his personal capacity. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the view of Licha Stelaus Productions.