We had a big topic this week. It is “curtain-up of The Drifting Theatre Hyokkori Hyoutanjima”.

“Hyokkori Hyoutanjima” is one of the most famous '60s national TV programs in Japan which was performed by puppet play. This time, it was made into a theatre for the first time.

I've already seen the theatre and also found many reviews by a large audience for it. I think that the reviews depend on each attachments to the original. The people, who expected to see a faithful drama of the original, tend to have negative comments. On the other hand, the people, who didn't have enough knowledge and any biases, seem to get positive feeling from the drama.

Interestingly, two groups, negative commenters and positive commenters, have a same impression that the theatre was strange. I think that the theatre has already succeeded at the time of getting this impression because Kazuyoshi Kushida, this theatre's director, has been aiming to make a theatre which no one has ever seen. When we see unfamiliar things, we can't express them properly but recognize them as strange things.

Maybe, this theatre isn't general theatre. It is a kind of affair which is happening on the stage. It looks like a contemporary dance which obscures a border between humans and puppets, or a big poem which is made of our memories, or an abstract painting which is seemingly drawn in an innocent way but it is made quite meaningly. Of course, the drama is also nonsense silly sketch sometimes. Kushida says about an interesting thing like this- “I want to make a theatre like the time of seeing cloud all the while. Clouds have neither start nor end, and Their shapes are always perfect. No one complains about them even if they don't show special happenings.”

Anyway, as the impression “strange” evinces, the theatre succeeded to be an epochal style “The Drifting Theatre” that we couldn't find in existing vocabulary. I'm glad to witness the birth of the style, and I'm proud of engaging in this theatre project.