Narrow Road to the Deep North
Narrow Road to the Deep North
Author: Edward Bond
First Performance: 1968, Coventry
Published: 1968
Genre: Drama in 2 acts
Setting: Japan, late 17th–19th c.
Cast: 16m, 4f
Basho, the great poet, journeying to the north of Japan to seek enlightenment, sees a baby abandoned by the riverside. Basho returns 30 years later to find a city where there was once only a village. It is ruled over by a cruel tyrant Shogo. Two years later, Basho is arrested and brought before Shogo, who orders him to bring up the child of the emperor he deposed. Basho, dismayed at Shogo's cruelty, conducts the tyrant's prime minister to a leader ‘five times more ruthless than Shogo’. This is the Commodore, a British colonialist, who with his evangelical sister Georgina will invade the south and depose Shogo, with promises of...
[The entire page is 326 words long]
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