The Diverのレビュー。 - The 4th Floor〜観劇・ロンドンの演劇、バレエ、ダンスのレビューなどなど〜

キンダイシュランは出せませんです。プレスナイトを見ていないから。
今度見に行った時に星つけます。

さて各紙が批評を出しています。
なんだか全文掲載しているけれど、これがいけないことだったら、即消します。

また、好意的なレビューを全文掲載したわけではなくて、
最初に出した、つまり、24日、25日に出したレビューは好評だった、ということです。
26日付けのレビューはなかなか厳しいものがありました。まだ時間の都合で掲載していないだけですが、リンクは貼っておきました。

タイム紙は以下の通り。

From The Times
June 25, 2008
The Diver at Soho Theatre, W1
The Diver
Sam Marlowe

《★★★☆☆》

The question “What possessed you?” assumes a double-edged potency in this blend of Noh drama and thriller. At its centre is a modern woman, Yumi, accused of murdering two children by arson. Around her swirl swathes of bright silk and ancient legend, with demons, dragons, emperors and their lovers gliding from their narratives into hers.

Hideki Noda and Colin Teevan previously collaborated on The Bee, in 2006, in which classical and contemporary - and Japanese and Western - theatrical traditions and themes overlapped. The Diver pushes that thrilling cultural collision farther, intertwining three strands: the 11th-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, a Noh play entitled Pearl Diver Woman, and a real-life criminal case.

We discover the accused, played in Noda's production with tremulous vulnerability by Kathryn Hunter, in a police psychiatrist's office. As she is questioned her persona shifts. She is the pearl diver risking her life to retrieve a priceless jewel from a dragon's underwater lair; she's the emperor's concubine, mother to the heroic Genji. She is Genji's mistress, tormented by his refusal to leave his pregnant wife, and briefly even Genji himself, each character a fragment of her fractured psyche.

Noda's production, designed by Catherine Chapman, features sliding paper screens and reflective surfaces that elegantly serve its ripples of resonance. Fans become champagne glasses or mobile phones; masked figures appear from behind the psychiatrist's coach. A grotesque television gameshow, in which the perfect woman is the prize, elides with a beautifully choreographed scene of seduction. And in a scene of startling emotional intensity, Yumi's abortion of her own baby is conveyed with a mass of shiny red fabric trailing a silken umbilical cord.

The proliferation of characters and storylines causes the play to lose focus intermittently. But Yumi's assumption of the roles of mother, mistress and self-sacrificing maiden points to restrictive views of femininity, all of which the transgressive, almost demonic act of conflagration of which she is accused has subverted. And the precious jewel at the bottom of the dragon's lake movingly represents not just the longed-for love of a faithless man, but his dead child, killed by its distraught mother before it could be born.

Hunter's performance gleams and changes shape like quicksilver, while Noda as the psychiatrist, and later, as Genji's wife, is a powerfully contained presence. There's excellent support, too, from Harry Gostelow and Glyn Pritchard in a production that, though sometimes as elusive as water, is, at its finest, as strong as a spring tide.

Box office: 020-7478 0100

Guardian紙は以下の通り

The Guardian

The Diver
Soho Theatre, London
《★★★☆☆》
Michael Billington
Tuesday June 24, 2008
The Guardian

This weird, often wonderful, evening is the latest in a series of contemporary Noh plays devised by Hideki Noda and Colin Teevan. Their 2006 show, The Bee, was apparently the bee's knees. While I was transfixed by Noda's production, I can't help feeling their latest venture, in drawing on three different sources, is thematically overloaded.

We are confronted by the real-life story of a modern Japanese accused of arson in which two children died. But the woman is seemingly possessed by the spirit of Lady Rokujo, from the 11th century The Tale of Genji, who, as spurned mistress of the eponymous emperor, avenged herself on his pregnant wife. As if not enough, reference is made to a traditional Noh play about a pearl diver who rescued a jewel stolen by a dragon-queen.

Article continues
As theatrical expertise, Noda's production, cleverly designed by Catherine Chapman, is remarkable. One minute we are in a shrink's bleak office in a Tokyo cop-shop. Then we are in the rolling deep of the ocean. Later the action from glitzy gameshow to classical festival, beautifully evoked by billowing parasols. Links between past and present are economically established: Lady Aoi, deceived wife of the Genji, calls his mistress on her mobile while entwining herself in silk befitting a medieval empress.

Kathryn Hunter, most shape-shifting of performers, brilliantly encompasses the haunted criminal, Genji's concubine-mother and aggrieved mistress, a masked demon, and the deep-sea diver - with barely any change of costume but by subtle changes in her vocal register and supple movements of her sinuous body; you feel there is nothing she can't play. Noda himself switches from concerned psychiatrist to angry Aio. Harry Gostelow doubles as treacherous Genji and two-timing prosecutor, while Glyn Pritchard moves deftly from police chief to camp compere.

The transitions are astonishing. Yet I am puzzled as to what it all adds up to. Few would dissent from the idea of timeless sexual betrayal and revenge. But the relevance of the lost jewels eludes me. And, for all the percussive music and vocal ululations, rituals of Noh drama are alien to a modern western audience. I was intrigued, bemused, startled and fascinated. But, while I applaud Noda's visual ingenuity, I feel he and Teevan over-egged the pudding. I shan't forget The Diver. I only wish I could plumb its narrative depths.

· Until July 19. Box office: 020-7478 0100.

What'sonStage紙は以下の通り

What's on Stage
The Diver
Venue: Soho Theatre
Where: Inner London
Date Reviewed: 24 June 2008
WOS Rating: ★★★★
Reader Reviews: View and add to our user reviews

The Barbican has the legend “do something different” enshrined in its logo, but the same job description could be as easily applied to the Soho Theatre, where the unexpected so often crops up in the name of the new. The Diver by the Japanese actor/director Hideki Noda and the Irish playwright Colin Teevan is nothing if not weird, a strange dream-like mix of interrogation, psychological case study and shifting narrative.

Kathryn Hunter plays a woman who has killed her lover’s two children in a crime of arson, but she is also possessed by the spirit of an eleventh century Japanese mistress bent on vengeance. Noda himself plays the inquisitive psychiatrist in a production he has directed as a playful meditation on Noh theatre techniques of stylized movement, a central female character (known as a “wig” role) and terse dialogue that threaten to become poetry.

And with his designer Catherine Chapman and sound expert Paul Arditti (using music by the Kabuki dance maestro Denzaemon Tanaka XIII), Noda has conjured a fluid stage world where the investigation seeps into rituals of celebrity culture, traditional festivals and the depths of the ocean. This last location is a reference to the Noh play in which a pearl diver salvages a jewel stolen by the dragon queen, but the symbol explodes at the end to encompass the terrors of lost love and child killing.

No actress is better than Hunter at suggesting layers of experience and despair, and she manages to convince us that she is a plausibly motivated Medea, a royal concubine and spurned mistress, a masked demon and “a bush that has no root.” The intense purity of the performance suggests a complex spirit of hurt, passion and revenge.

The mystery is instigated when the woman is found wandering alone in a city by night, her hands burnt and raw and the play attempts to frame her identity in the joint location of a police cell and psychiatrist’s study. The tragedy is not so much a personal one as the inability of us all to arrive at explanations. This unusual, challenging scenario is driven by Hunter but densely populated, too, by Noda and the support playing of Harry Gostelow and Glyn Pritchard.