Japanese Portraits by Donald Richie

Author:Donald Richie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0804837724
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2013-03-25T09:12:04+00:00

Tamasaburo Bando

He impersonates that male invention, feminity, and does it so well that only those seams which he wants to show are allowed to be visible. A man imitating a woman imitating a lady. This expert imitation is evident particularly in that weary yet still popular play about Dr. Hanaoka's wife which I went to see him in.

The doctor's mother and spouse are in competition to see who can show the most devotion. Like most Shimpa, it is filled with the stuff of tragedy: lots of cancer, women being gored in the breasts by crazed cows, the doctor's grand experiment where he puts both under anesthesia and the wife goes blind and the mother is consumed with jealousy because she too had wanted in equally drastic fashion to prove her devotion to her doctor son.

Afterward I go to pay my respects. Tamasaburo is in a mauve dressing gown, decolleté. All makeup off, he looks scrubbed, very young.

- I didn't think you'd like Shimpa, he says: Too weepy.

He then tells me something about it, that century-old domestic drama, being careful about its dates and judicious about its qualities. Like many actors Tamasaburo wants to give an impression of seriousness. He wants to talk about ideas, as though to prove that he is capable of them.

All trace of the feminity I saw portrayed on the stage is gone. He is, rather, like an adolescent, still retaining something of the gender freedom of childhood but already concerned with the ways of the adult world; thinking about it, making sense of it.

I spoke of the day's performance and mentioned that his pregnancy was so convincing the audience laughed.

- Well, he said: One has to do something.

I wonder if actors know how dreadful their plays often are. Maybe they are right not to. The audience does, though—laughing during a tragedy, for example. This could easily destroy the supension of belief we are told is necessary for theater to work. Well, maybe, but that is only the case in Western theater. At the Shimpa, disbelief is part of the experience. Nobody goes to see the play, they go to see the actor.

- That's because acting here is all to do with technique, said Tamasaburo: Even when I was little I learned roles as you learn a sport. People come to see me like they go to see a good sumo wrestler or a good baseball pitcher. They watch me perform. Oh, you can see them getting their hankies out, but they're also watching to see how well you do what you do. And you do it well because you know how to do it. You don't have to feel anything. You're not supposed to.

I asked if he didn't feel like a woman when he played a woman.

He laughed. How would I know? he said: I'm not a woman.

Then, remembering that he was the host, he politely asked, since we had been speaking of acting, about my small role in Teshigahara's film, Rikyu, which he had heard I was in.

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