When we met last weekend, the world-renowned English theater director David Leveaux was relaxing with a cigarette "in the lovely sunshine" outside a rehearsal studio by Tokyo Bay. He was there for an intensive afternoon's work with the three Japanese actors who form the cast of his upcoming production of "Old Times" by Harold Pinter (1930-2008) at the Nissay Theatre in Tokyo's Hibiya district — for which he is creating a Noh-style platform stage but with LED lights around.
Premiered in 1971 at the Almeida Theatre in London, this classic work by the Nobel Prize-winning English playwright revolves around two women and a man meeting after years apart and sharing memories of their overlapping lives long before.
Though his work is regularly staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Donmar Warehouse and the Almeida in London, Leveaux, 56 — who has garnered five U.S. Tony Award nominations — calls Japan his third home (after London and New York), having been semi-resident in Tokyo for 13 years from 1993 when he cofounded its cutting-edge Theatre Project Tokyo with Hitoshi Kadoi and became its artistic director.