Tokyo-based writer, director and actor Hideki Noda returns to the Soho Theatre with ‘One Green Bottle’, a new three-hander that’s one part traditional Japanese theatre, one part farcical pantomime and one part sledgehammer social satire. And all completely bonkers.
There are three characters – a thespian dad played by a woman (Kathryn Hunter wearing a shiny bald-cap), a boyband-obsessed mum played by a man (the hysterically overacting Noda himself) and a teenage daughter played by a middle-aged bloke (Glyn Pritchard, flouncing around with purple bangs). They’re a ceaselessly fratching family, and tonight they can’t decide who gets to go out and who has to stay in and watch the pregnant dog, which is actually a giant stuffed toy.
Wait, there’s more.
The OTT action occasionally veers away from screeched arguments and cartoonish scraps with foam props into montages of noh (an age-old Japanese theatre style), into static-filled projections and eventually into absurd tragedy – they all chain themselves up, throw away the keys and settle in to starve to death.
Presumably the piece suffers in translation. Will Sharpe’s adaptation is nothing if not idiosyncratic, but one senses that could just be the madcap mania of Noda’s original seeping through. Still, it’s tough to understand any of it – the cross-gendered casting, the strangely archaic language, Yukio Horio’s completely plastic set – beyond a woolly, insistent observation that technology is driving us apart. If it was a British play, I’d call it wildly undercooked.
Denzaemon Tanaka XIII provides a jangling traditional kabuki score live throughout, while Hunter, Noda and Pritchard embrace their grotesque caricatures with plenty of gusto. They’re all intensely physical performers and it’s their enthusiasm in hurling themselves around bruisingly for the entire 70 minutes that salvages a scrap of enjoyment from the evening. It’s kinda fun watching them ham it up to 11. But ‘One Green Bottle’ is mostly plain weird and not particularly wonderful.
By: Fergus Morgan