Japanese Kabuki: Character Versus Actor

In the finale of that play, the main character, Oedipus, who has killed his own father and inadvertently married his own mother, after he returns to the stage from blinding himself offstage so that the audience is not exposed to this act on stage (a moment which would be allowed on the kabuki stage), says "I did it myself, I killed my father with my own hands, it was no other, but me." The actor's ability to act matters greatly, but only in so far as he can make the audience believe in the character Oedipus's ego. In kabuki, acting ability matters greatly also, but when Ichikawa Danjūrō boasts his family lineage he is talking about an ego which is his, as an actor, not the character Gongorō’s in the play Shibaraku. The audience at kabuki is not permitted to forget that the actor is an actor rather than the character he plays.

The phenomenon of self-reference and stepping out of character by actors in the kabuki theater is a common practice today throughout the world's theaters; the world has learned from Japan. However, it was not the norm in traditional Western theater where character acting was the rule. We have in kabuki, in bunraku, and in nō, not only an important source for many of the theatrical practices of the world, but also a strong precedence for Japan's dominance in the field of anime and video and interactive computer games, not to mention other aspects of popular culture, including the entertaining value of robots.

In Japanese traditional drama one did not try to become involved with the inner character by means of plot but rather through the theatricality, the acting, and the moments of action. The extent to which this is the case is encapsulated, I think, in the reply of the kabuki actor Utaemon, a celebrated onnagata actor, when he was asked what he thought about using women as actors in the kabuki theater, instead of only men. He said, "There is no woman in all of Japan who can act in as feminine a manner on stage as I." Men can act as women better than women, dolls can seem more lifelike than the kabuki actors. Bunraku imitates the kabuki actors imitating humans, but kabuki often imitates the bunraku dolls imitating them. Like the present-day examples of popular culture, it is virtual reality with which we are dealing.

Mae J. Smethurst

Mae J. Smethurst (1935-2019) was a Professor Emerita in Classics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research interests included ancient literary theory, drama, lyric poetry and comparative theory, particularly comparisons of Greek tragedy and Japanese noh.