A play based on Jean Genet’s "Les Paravents" was shown at Setagaya Public Theatre in early July. The piece was first staged in Berlin in 1961, and when shown at the Odeon Theatre in Paris in 1966 it ended in a major scandal because of the play’s sarcastic and critical view of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). With a duration of at least three hours and a half, and a cast of about 100 characters, this stage version was produced by French director Frederic Fisbach, who applied the techniques of Japanese Joruri puppet drama to the dialogues, and employed next to real actors the puppets of the Joruri-oriented Yuki-za puppet theatre company.

photo by Ishikawa Jun

These puppets are what caused some difficulties. Since the ones Yuki-za is using are less than half the size of traditional Joruri dolls, their actions and 'facial expressions' were difficult to recognize. The problem was tackled by handing out opera glasses, but it’s needless to say that such things spoil the fun. It might have been a better idea to choose a venue smaller than Setagaya Public Theatre, but even then I guess the 'minimal,' and even more the 'poor-looking' feel would have dominated the impression. Maybe that was the director’s original intention, but to tell it straight away, it was just painful for the eyes to jump back and forth between the subtitles left and right of the stage, and the tiny little puppets in the middle.

On the other hand, it was impressive to witness Japanese puppets in the roles of French military policemen, immigrants, Arabs, prostitutes, and even corpses. Originally written from the viewpoint of the Algerians, Genet clearly pointed out the chain of discrimination between natives in the suzerain state of France, soldiers that were dispatched from there, immigrants that settled over to North Africa, the Arabs those settlers are exploiting, Berbers that are made fun of by the Arabs, etc. This he did while throwing in dialogues and behavior enriched with his trademark sexual topics and scatological allusions (the scene where fellow soldiers cheer on those who were going to die at the front, saying "let them smell the flavour of the mother country" and belting out "La Marseillaise," is sidesplitting).

photo by Ishikawa Jun

The discrimination problem is in fact not as simple as explained above. I was instantly thinking of the discrimination between the Edo shogunate and Satsuma, between the Satsuma feudal clan and Ryukyu, and between the Ryukyu shogunate and Sakishima (Yaeyama) islands. However, no matter whether you are on an island in South Japan or in a clan in North Africa, discrimination is usually subdivided and stretches endlessly, going as deep as discrimination in communities, between, and even within families. This means that discrimination is a universal problem, and as something that can happen anywhere at any time, Genet arranged the 'global' matter of discrimination in the special, peculiar setting of Algeria during the War of Independence.

Fisbach’s style — just like that of Peter Brook — seems to borrow from Brecht’s 'theatre of the intellect' on one side, and from Artaud’s 'theatre of atrocity' on the other. Since I am not a specialist, I can't judge this properly, but what I can say with certainty is that, when Robert Wilson doesn't let his protagonist in "Madame Butterfly" wave the Stars and Stripes banner, and when Peter Brook lets a (black) boy who lives in the present (or who could live in any other age) play the leading part in "The Tragedy of Hamlet," a certain 'will of universality' shines through. I appreciate the exclusion of political and economical globalization, but I think that in a world that hasn't changed its structure since the Algerian war, universality in art forms of cultural expression is more than ever a necessary aspect nowadays.