A Night at the Kabuki Presented by Noda Map and Sony Music Entertainment at Sadler’s Wells, London (review)

Reviewed by: A Night at the Kabuki Presented by Noda Map and Sony Music Entertainment at Sadler’s Wells, London Todd Andrew Borlik A Night at the Kabuki Presented by Noda Map and Sony Music Entertainment at Sadler’s Wells, London. 22–24 September 2022. Written and directed by Hideki Noda. Music by Queen. Set design by Yukio Horio. Lighting design by Motoi Hattori. Costume design by Kodue Hibino. With Takako Matsu (Old Juliet), Suzu Hirose (Young Juliet of Minamoto), Takaya Kamikawa (Old Romeo), Jun Shishon (Young Romeo of Taira), Satoshi Hashimoto (Yoshinaka/Yoritomo/Monk), Naoto Takenaka (Kiyomori/Bontaro), Kazushiga Komatsu (Mercury/Platinum), Hideki Noda (Nurse), and others. Although one would be hard-pressed to guess so from its title, A Night at the Kabuki just might be the most raucous, flamboyant, and insanely zany reimagining of Romeo and Juliet ever to bedazzle a London audience. The brainchild of Japanese actor-playwright-director Hideki Noda, A Night at the Kabuki premiered in Tokyo in 2019 and played at Sadler’s Wells (after a COVID-19-induced delay) for three nights in late September 2022, and was performed by the original cast in Japanese with English surtitles. For readers unfamiliar with the name, Noda has garnered acclaim for his innovative scripts that mingle anachronisms, absurdist wordplay, intercultural hybridity, dark comedy, and brutality with gleeful abandon—all of which were on radiant display in A Night at the Kabuki. The great Yukio Ninagawa once hailed Noda as “the most talented playwright in contemporary Japan,” and this production certainly bolstered his claim to be among the nation’s most fearless Shakespeareans. Early in his career, Noda transplanted Richard III (1990) to a school of Japanese flower arranging, set Much Ado About Nothing (1990) amid a sumo tournament, and reimagined the enchanted woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1992) as an amusement park (haunted by Mephistopheles) at the foot of Mount Fuji. In 2021, Noda staged an original play entitled Fakespeare, in which a Shakespeare-obsessed spirit medium in rural Japan contacts Shakespeare’s ghost (played by Noda himself) and one of his descendants, a rapper named Fakespeare, who manifest themselves in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to warn the world about the pandemic of fake [End Page 133] news. Anti-Stratfordians, please take note. Having read about Fakespeare, I was braced for A Night at the Kabuki to present an unconventional take on Romeo and Juliet. It did not disappoint. How to summarize this outrageously eclectic adaptation by a playwright committed to, in the words of the program, “working energetically beyond genres and borders”? Watching it was like having a front-row seat for the fever dream of a time traveler who splits their days between the Tokyos and Londons of several pasts as well as the present, and has dozed off mid-transit while reading Romeo and Juliet and listening to a Queen album. A Night at the Kabuki was both an adaptation of and a sequel to Romeo and Juliet (with four star-crossed lovers rather than two), set not in Renaissance Verona but in a cross between medieval and twenty-first-century Japan, with the legendary war between the Genji and Heike clans providing a homegrown equivalent to the Montague-Capulet feud. The costumes (Genji in blue and Heike in red) and exuberant performance style often channeled Japanese Kabuki, but the soundtrack was lifted from Queen’s A Night at the Opera (hence the title). According to the program notes, Noda had been toying with the idea of a Romeo and Juliet sequel when someone close to Brian May, Queen’s guitarist, approached him about directing a Japanese-inspired rock opera version of Queen’s platinum album, presumably envisioning a libretto based on Freddie Mercury’s lyrics. Instead, the Anglophile Noda decided to pair Britain’s second most popular rock group after The Beatles with Britain’s most renowned playwright, creating synergies between the two by weaving tracks like “Love of My Life” into the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s love tragedy. This was not a show for Shakespeare purists, aging rockers, or Kabuki aficionados, but it managed to enthrall with the sheer audacity of its mash...