"I always believed it was taboo to portray madness on stage, and I never dared to do it before," Hideki Noda writes in the program notes to "Urikotoba (Fighting talk/Words for sale)," his latest enterprise as writer/director, now playing at Spiral Hall in Tokyo's Aoyama district.
It is true that insanity, by its often sensational nature, may serve to grab an audience's attention. However, in this dramatization from the celebrated poetry anthology "Chieko Shou" by Kotaro Takamura (1883-1956), Noda -- fresh from his Grand Prix award for his groundbreaking kabuki production of "Togitatsu no Utare (Togitatsu's Revenge)" at last month's Asahi Performing Arts Prize -- spurns any populist angles and instead delves deep into the nature of love and devotion, and of dreams and dreamers.
That the play's real-life heroine did end her days in a hospital for the insane is far from the main focus of the piece. Instead, the play begins with a teenaged Chieko bursting through a paper background astride a bicycle, full of vigor in the days before she met Takamura, the eminent poet, writer and sculptor whom she married in 1915. Symbolizing both Chieko's own hopes, and those of many women in her day who sought to break through the social constraints imposed upon them, it is a startling opener to this 90-minute tour de force described by its creator as "not an 'I' story or poem, but a 'we' drama."