The Language and Voice of the Shite in Sukehiro Hirakawa and Satoshi Miyagi's Mugen-noh Othello

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  • NAKATANI, Mori
    Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University

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  • 平川祐弘作・宮城聰演出『夢幻能オセロー』におけるシテの言葉と声

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Abstract

This paper examines the text and the performance of Mugen-noh Othello, written by Sukehiro Hirakawa and directed by Satoshi Miyagi (the originalproduction in 2005 was titled Ku Na'uka de Mugennoh na Othello). In particular, it focuses on the language and voice used in the adaptation's attempt to challenge the modern conception of a dramatic character as an independent subject. Combining Shakespeare's Othello with a fukushiki mugen-noh play, the adaptation transforms Desdemona into the shite who appears as the ghost of Desdemona. At the climax, the shite enacts Othello's murder of Desdemona whilst she is representing both the victim and the wrongdoer. The critics have interpreted this act as the socio-political resolution of binary opposites such as men/women and black/white. Nevertheless, they have rarely discussed the mode and the effect of the language and voice enabling the final consolidation of the subject and the object. Whereas Hirakawa rewrites Desdemona as a dramatic agent of mutability, by availing himself of the linguistic nature of Japanese, Miyagi's production, by staging the complex relationship between body and language, performs the process of physically materialising such language as the shite's voice on stage.

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