The two Japanese productions of Macbeth: Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Yukio Nevagawa's Ninaga Wa's Macbeth

[摘要] Among productions of Shakespeare's plays in recent years, some cultural adaptations by Asian and other foreign directors are more highly regarded than English productions which use the original texts. Two such productions are Throne of Blood, a film directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1957, and Ninagowa 's Macbeth, a stage production by Yukio Ninagawa in 1980, ( first staged in Tokyo, in Edinburgh in 1985, and in London 1987). The significance of these foreign productions is how they revive the power of Shakespeare's originals energetically in their different cultural, social, religious and linguistic context. These two Japanese productions of Macbeth show the examples of those productions which succeeded in transforming and reviving the power of the play into their own tradition. To understand the Japanese re-interpretation of the play, the viewer or the audience must learn about the cultural background, which describes Shakespeare's play from the Eastern point of view. Westernrepresentatives of productions of the play are, on film, Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, and on stage, Trevor Nunn. Through consideration of these western productions, the originality and uniqueness of the Japanese adaptations of the play can be seen. The intensity and suspense of the drama are most impressively expressed in their own Japanese cultural context. It can be said that the encounter of the East and the West brings another aspect to the interpretation of Shakespeare's drama as performance.

[发布机构] University:University of Birmingham;Department:School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies, Department of English Literature

[关键词] P Language and Literature;PN Literature (General);PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater