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‘When I see other plays in the theatre, sometimes I feel bored!’ says sprightly 68-year-old Japanese stage legend Hideki Noda. ‘So when we’re rehearsing, I’m always talking to myself asking – is this boring or not?’
For his latest extravaganza, Noda has adapted a Dostoevsky novel for the stage; no mean feat – boring or not – but such challenges don’t phase him. Although the storied Japanese director’s version of Russian masterwork The Brothers Karamazov is in no way a faithful retelling of the theological murder mystery; for starters, it relocates the action from Russia to a Nagasaki courtroom.
Which is why I’ve flown halfway across the world to meet Hideki and see Love In Action during its 75-date tour of Tokyo, Kitakyushu and Osaka, before it transfers to Sadler’s Wells for an ultra-brief special run from October 31 to November 2.
With a career stretching back to the ’70s, including lengthy spells in London and Edinburgh, Noda – who was awarded an honourary OBE in 2009 and became the artistic director of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre the same year – has rejigged the classics before. In 2022, his Noda Map company took A Night at the Kabuki to Sadler’s, which Time Out’s theatre editor Andrzej Łukowski branded a ‘wild, dayglo reinterpretation of Romeo & Juliet’. Here, Noda played fast and loose with the original plot (in his version, the star cross’d lovers actually survive!), and similar liberties are taken with Love in Action.
Set like The Brothers Karamazov among a family of firework makers, it looks at the murder of the patriarch by one of his sons after they both fall for the same woman. But that’s where the similarities end. Avoiding too many spoilers, what I will say is that Noda’s flashy production is as high-octane as theatre can be, full of physical high jinks and regal moments of slapstick chaos.
The never-boring Noda is in charge of direction and screenplay, as well as taking on a main role in Love In Action alongside an all-star cast. But when I see the production at Osaka’s Sky Theatre, it’s clear that much of the crowd is here to see one man: Jun Matsumoto of J-pop group Arashi, who plays the oldest son. Earlier this year The Spectator reported that tickets for the Tokyo run were reselling for £5,000 to fans eager for a glimpse of the 41-year-old Japanese idol. Also in the production are movie stars Eita Nagayama (Monster) and Masami Nagasawa (Kingdom), who play Matsumoto’s siblings, with veteran actor Naoto Takenaka taking on the role of the unlucky father.
It feels pretty special to have scored one of the hottest tickets in town. Even more so when it transpires that I’m the only one in the entire 1,200-strong crowd who’s been given a phone screen with subtitles (which will be projected onto the stage for the London run). Despite not speaking Japanese, the language barrier often feels surprisingly flimsy due to the sheer physicality of the piece. I’m so engrossed by the action on the stage that I regularly have to catch myself and remember to look at the the translation in front of me.
Through high drama courtroom scenes to furiously funny fights and an emotionally devastating ending, the two and half hour production is received with five solid minutes of applause. The cast return to take deeper bows, and Noda is finally beckoned back alone. ‘Japanese curtain calls are too long!’ he says cheerily when we meet after the show.
I sit down with him after the following day’s matinee and Noda is quick to explain that you definitely do not need to have read Dostoyevsky’s original novel in advance of seeing the play. In fact, he’s keen that you avoid it entirely. Noda himself first read the sprawling novel in his 20s and returned to it in preparation for Love in Action. ‘When I re-read it it was totally different! I thought it was mainly about the trial – but that’s only about 100 pages of about 700.’
The original novel is also heavy on theology, something Noda was keen to avoid in his production. ‘I kind of gave up on the religion, as Japanese people don’t really do religion in the same way. It’s much quieter.’ Instead, Noda wanted to focus on themes he saw as far more relevant. ‘It’s also about family and love. And love in action!’.
Noda has worked in theatre since the 1970s. After studying in London in the early 1990s, he founded Noda Map and returns to the UK regularly, bringing with him the likes of his first English language play, The Bee, a salaryman satire that Time Out called a ‘highly unusual theatrical gem’. In many ways, Love in Action brings Noda full circle, taking him back to Nagasaki, where he was born in 1955.
‘As a child I didn’t think much about the atomic bomb, but gradually becoming older and older, I recognised that most Japanese people have started to forget that only Japanese people had this experience. But it was also kind of taboo to talk about it,’ he explains of the social stigma surrounding survivors in the decades following the bombings. ‘People who suffered from the atomic bomb hid it, otherwise they couldn’t get married.’
A year before the eightieth anniversary of the United States’ bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Noda is nudging the attacks back into public consciousness. While in Japan I take a day trip to Hiroshima. An hour and half from Osaka on the bullet train, Hiroshima sits under the heavy weight of history. Even before I visit the powerful displays of victims’ belongings at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the haunting Genbaku Dome – the only structure left standing in the hypocentre of the bomb – the lack of any buildings over 100 years old in the main town offers eerie evidence of how the city was utterly flattened. On August 6 1945, the US bombed Hiroshima, to force Japanese surrender in WWII. Three days later they did the same to Nagaskai. The first – and only – use of nuclear bombings in armed conflict, up to a quarter of a million people died. The message of the museum is clear; that this should never be allowed to happen again and is echoed by the emotional finale of Love In Action, which seems even more prescient in time where the indiscriminate bombing of civilians is far from a thing of the past.
Love in Action is at Sadler’s Wells, Thu Oct 31-Sat.
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