Written in Japan, December 2017. An edited version was published on curtaincallonline.com and was commissioned by them.

Letter from Tokyo: ‘The angle of the bow...’

A Streetcar Named Desire has a rich stage history in Japan - almost as much as it does in the UK - there is a received idea about the play, the characters and how it should be done. Our Blanche, the great Otake Shinobu - a sort of Japanese Barbra Streisand / Helen Mirren (1) - played Blanche for the first time for Yukio Ninagawa in 2002. The Japan Times thought that she looked “younger than her sister”, Stella. However the Japanese Streetcar is dominated by one name alone, Haruko Sugimura, who played the role on the Japanese stage for the Bungakuza Theatre Company for six hundred-odd performances over thirty-four years (Blanche’s stated age). She played the role for the last time well in to her eighties. Most of the cast can do passable impressions of her Blanche, which have them donning feather boas, running headlong from any light source and fainting on to a bed in Judith Bliss style paroxysms of hysteria. One of them did it after turning on their mobile phone last week. It looks fabulous. I was genuinely sorry to miss it. This Blanche was as much a Tokyo landmark as neon advertising.

So there’a a whole other text for the Japanese Streetcar even before we get to the actual text. Ours is translated by Koshi Odashima of Waseda University, it was done for Ninagawa in ’02 and it’s in many ways canonical. At first glance you notice that it’s big. Longer than the English version, in word count by maybe 15%, and anyone who’s directed A Streetcar Named Desire in English will know the exquisite fear experienced by glancing at your stopwatch after a one-hour forty-five minute first stagger through of act one. 

The length in Japanese, you realise (or at least I did), is down to the fact that a lot of the play is about class, and the Japanese have a vast linguistic structure around addressing another person and designating status. For example ‘Hajimamishite’ is a word used only on meeting somebody for the first time, it means, roughly ‘and so it has begun’ (2) accompanied by the angle appropriate bow. The Japanese attitude to others is encoded in the fabric of their language and there are attitudes and subtleties, very obvious to a Japanese sensibility, about how to approach social status. 

It’s not too foreign a concept to the British. Try explaining to a Japanese person that when a ticket inspector on train in England calls you ‘sir’, firstly you must pay attention to the heavy, toxic exhalation before the word, and that he doesn't mean ‘sir’, he means something like ‘arsehole’. 

So in our Streetcar we are witnessing the linguistic codification of a way of life that the Japanese have no other way of expressing, abutting against the mores of the southern American aristocracy, being directed by an English director not natively accustomed to the sultry New Orleans temperatures.

As Williams, through Blanche, tells us ‘life is so full of evasions and ambiguities’. The play is language games, it’s practically all evasion and ambiguity. So our translator has to judge where or where not to help his audience understand the drift of each character. Part of the word count is taken up in making explicit where this male translator in his fifties thinks his audience needs help with what is implied. On the one hand the actors are desperate to convey these subtle shifts of meaning in Williams’ text once they know what they are, and have found the text too explicit. But on the other hand a simple word like ‘why’ is translated as a question, where as Williams uses as an exclamation to denote aristocratic status, like Scarlett O’Hara saying, ‘Why, I do declare…’. Which the translator is trying to fix.

Which brings us back to age.

In A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche DuBois tries to hide her age. More specifically, a major plot point revolves around the fact that Blanche pretends to be her sister Stella’s younger sister. Only problem is, Japanese doesn’t have a word for sister. Not an age neutral word like ‘sister’. There are two words ‘imoto’ meaning ‘younger sister’ and ‘oneesan’ meaning ‘older sister’ - I ask what the Japanese do with twins - of course there is a word for ‘twin’; which isn’t helpful. Stella introduces Blanche to Mitch thus:

‘Oneesan, Mitchell-san, Hubbel-san, Gonzales-san desu’

or literally… 

‘Older sister, the honourable Mr. Mitchell, the honourable Mr. Hubbel, the honourable Mr. Gonzales this is”.

The plot revolves around Mitch discovering that Blanche has lied to him about her age. She tells him later in the scene that she is Stella’s younger sister. God knows how this exchange played in Sugimura-san’s twilight performances. 

This puts me in mind of an account Arthur Miller gave after going to see A View from the Bridge in China, where, on the first entrance of Catherine, Eddie Carbone walked downstage and said to the audience “I am in love with her…”. 

Odashima-san has replaced most of the ‘Blanche’s’ in the play with ‘Oneesan’ (3). So the actors and I go back through the play replacing all ‘Oneesan’’s with ‘Blanche’, or ‘Buranchi’ because there is no ‘ell’ sound in Japanese (4), or ‘ch’ sound. I argue that even in Japanese ‘Buranchi’ is translated to Mitch by Blanche, as meaning ‘white’, which with every new mention of the word as the play progresses, takes on a more and more complex meaning as her past is uncovered. ‘Blanche’, I say is very deliberately used as a linguistic game by the playwright, and that replacing this word with an implicit reminder of Blanche’s age starts to beggar belief. But Odashima-san tells me that to not address your older sister as ‘oneesan’ sounds strange to Japanese ear. I have often felt that this is one linguistic vortex that I should not be getting sucked in to - I don’t speak a word of Japanese. But when I see good actors blocked, when the physicality of an actor as great as Otake Shinobu stops operating with scalpel like precision and becomes vague, I know that we haven’t got the translation right. So we go back to the drawing board…

Odashima-san is translating culture and social structure, I explain we’re doing that with set costumes and gesture. I want him to translate what’s coming through the play, the ache, the cry of pain. He says that you can’t understand the ache if the play’s language is alienating to Japanese ear. This creative friction has made for very slow and at times heavy going in rehearsals, but what it has meant that is that the actors, Odashima-san (5) and I have gone over every word of this play with a fine-tooth comb and it has been one of the most richly rewarding experiences of my life.

We have a whole new translation - which is both Japanese and American. And now it’s roughly the same word count in both languages. I’m told it sounds odd to a Japanese ear, but in a good way (6), perhaps like the way the name and the patronymic sound in English Chekhov. Like a demented cowboy, I have lassoed good Japanese speakers whose first language is English that I’ve met in restaurants and at parties and corralled them in to rehearsals to listen to our play, and they’ve got it. One even said that Blanche’s famous ‘streetcar speech’ was ravishingly beautiful, and she told Odashima-san this, he very generously pointed out that this was entirely the work of Otake-san, who improvised it in rehearsal three weeks ago. 

I know nothing of Japan. Our Irish composer Paddy Cunneen observes that public life here is a dance. Extravagant gesture everywhere, from the bow, to the punctuated nod when some-one else is speaking (7), to traffic cops, to the station master at Kyoto-station beckoning in the bullet train and pointing it up to the heavens. And he’s right. This ability to grade meaning by gesture has helped us access some of Williams’ exquisite ambiguities, perhaps uniquely. Our translation exists somewhere between the words. Somewhere between the UK, Tokyo and the mind of our playwright, but definitely not wholly in either. Mitch’s bow to Blanche in scene 5 is beautiful, liberated when the actor realised that we could utilise the Japanese understanding of the bow in this moment. The young collector bobs his head continuously as Blanche speaks, but never taking his eyes of her, it’s very subversive, and very, very sexy… 

Now I get back to the bit about directing that I always forget, but is always there, like death and taxes. Panicking about the running time of act one. It’s December. It’s cold. I look through my notes from yesterday and I kick myself, one word dominates. Heat. Heat. Heat…

_________

(1) Her latest album is advertised on giant billboards outside Tower Records in Shibuya.

(2) I’ve always thought that to be very cool. 

(3) to denote the appropriate respect and aristocratic status.

(4) (With heaven-splitting violence) SUTERAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

(5) but you have to remember the Japanese are VERY polite, scrupulously so, apart from on the issue of body weight. Literally everyone I meet tells me that I’m fat. I mean EVERYONE. As baldly as that. ‘You are very fat’. My leading man even played my stomach like an orchestral timpani to the huge amusement of the rest of the cast on the first day of rehearsals. I’m a big lad, for sure, but you know, not HUGE. 

(6) A word on Odashima-san. I don’t want this to come across in anyway negative about him. He’s an amazing man. Translating anything from English to Japanese is hard, let alone A Streetcar Named Desire. He’s certainly translated one more play in to Japanese than I have. He’s been completely gracious and hardworking in this collaboration. He could have very easily said ‘Ahem. Ninagawa was alright with this you know lad…’ But he didn’t. He splits his time between us, teaching at the University and attending rehearsals of a Japanese Ray Cooney farce that he’s translated. His father was one of the great translators of Shakespeare in to the Japanese language.

(7) This is known as ‘Izuchi’ or ‘counter hammer, taken from the fact that two craftsmen with a hammer each are required to strike one after the other to temper the steel of a newly fashioned samurai sword. 

© Phillip Breen