Noda Hideki (playwright)

This is a page for Noda Hideki, Japanese dramatist. For the race car driver, please see Hideki Noda.

Hideki Noda (野田秀樹 Noda Hideki, born 20 December 1955) is an acclaimed Japanese actor, playwright and theatre director who has written and directed more than forty plays in Japan, as well as working at bringing modern Japanese theatre to an international audience.

Biography

Noda was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He briefly attended Tokyo University to study law but dropped out after a time. Noda presented his first play, An Encounter Between Love and Death in his second year of high school. In 1981 he presented his play The Advent of the Beast for which he won an award. This was his claim to fame and in 1993, he was invited to perform at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. He also participated in 1990. In 2008 he was also appointed artistic director of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space in Ikebukuro, and to be a professor in the Department of Moving Images and Performing Arts at the capital's Tama Art University.^[1]

In 1992, Noda went to London to study theatre. When he returned to Japan, he started the independent company Noda Map, solely for the purpose of promoting and producing pieces of theatre.^[1] He is currently held in high regard within the Japanese theatre community. Japanese theatre director Yukio Ninagawa said of him, "Hideki Noda is the most talented playwright in contemporary Japan."

Plays

His first international work was Red Demon, which he performed in Japan for the first time in 1997 and then in English at the Young Vic Theatre in London in 2003. The cast included Marcello Magni, Tamzin Griffin and Simon MacGregor, with Noda himself playing the Red Demon. The play has also been performed in Thai and Korean. Each version was translated and re-worked in an attempt to be more appealing to each specific culture. For example, the Thai version of the play included music that was neither in the original Japanese version, nor in the English version.

The story is that of a man who is washed up on an isolated island with no means of communicating where he is from. The sheltered islanders mistake him for a demon. The result is a black comedy, the themes of which are tolerance vs. discrimination.

Unfortunately, the English version was attacked by the Japanese media as no longer being Noda Hideki’s work – the translation lost the poetry and nuance that the Japanese work had once boasted. Noda Hideki, while having studied abroad, is not known for his English-speaking ability and had the script translated and rewritten by English writers Roger Pulvers and Matt Wilkinson.

Noda has been collaborating with the playwright Colin Teevan and the actress Kathryn Hunter, producing English versions of The Bee (2006) and The Diver (2008) in London. He was also a member of the cast for these productions.^[1] The Japanese version of The Diver will be performed in Tokyo in 2009 with Shinobu Otake.^[2]

Style

The notable characteristics of Noda’s plays are first, and most well-known in Japan, his use of language in terms of limericks and word play.^[3] He frequently uses obsolete and old terminology from famous pieces of classical literature as if they were modern-day terms. This helps to create a separate world in which his plays can exist – apart from the reality of the audience. His plays, while often dealing with cliché or everyday topics, try to present the issues in a new way, and his use of old and odd language helps to objectify the play’s theme.

Noda was initially interested in revitalizing Japanese theatre and breaking away from the stylised theatre of Noh and Kabuki. His objective was to be as strange and entertaining as possible, touching on modern values, concerns and social issues. This resulted in a unique and highly stylised visual performance of design and movement. He often takes classical Japanese literature and plays and re-vitalises them in a modern form.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Profile on Nodamap website. [1] Retrieved on 2009-07-10.
2. ^ Nodamap website. nodamap: Diver J Retrieved on 2009-07-10.
3. ^ Profile on Performing Arts Network Japan. [2] Retrieved on 2009-07-10.

External links

• (Japanese) NODA MAP
• Profile on Performing Arts Network Japan