Mansai Nomura’s recent staging of “Macbeth” at the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris drew a varied and enthusiastic audience.
The beautiful, restrained production reflected the intensity of the events leading up to and from Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan. And as the director and star later told us in his post-performance Q&A for which almost the whole audience remained, the Paris theater is much smaller than the company’s home at the Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo, and so everything, including the sensations, was condensed.
The range of questions demonstrated the depth of interest in this adaptation of Shakespeare’s shortest (but very bloody) play. Nomura was asked about his interest in combining theatrical forms, about noh, and about melding it with kyōgen. Then when it was suggested that butoh had influenced his interpretation, Nomura entirely agreed.