[In the following review of a 1995 adaptation of Macbeth performed at the Zen Zen Zo theater in Kyoto, Brady discusses the expressionistic power of this bilingual English/Japanese performance and identifies several of the production's stylistic flaws.]

Seized by students in the 1960s and run by them still, Kyoto University's Seibu Kodo stands isolated in a pitted, unpaved lot strewn with refuse. This is the ramshackle headquarters for Zen Zen Zo, a theatrical experiment in cross-cultural form. A multinational troupe directed by Australian Simon Woods, Zen Zen Zo has experimented for three years with fusing Japanese performance techniques and classical Western theatre texts. Something new results: a performance text that might best be called a Butoh meditation on a Western classic.

With Shakespeare's Macbeth as metatext this season, the troupe's Japanese, Australian, and American actors created a performance text distilling Macbeth's deep and dark desires into a raw, expressionistic, Butoh-inspired hell broth of horror and fatality. With Shakespeare's text cut and fragmented into thematic shards of language, the production relies heavily on the human form, dance, and composer Colin Webber's driving, percussive music to communicate Macbeth's slide into hell. Supporting characters and plot lines have been pared away, revealing Macbeth's mythical core. To give symmetry to the bilingual aspects of the performance, there are four witches—two speaking in English, two in Japanese.

Inspired by Shakespeare's bloody man motif, the opening sequence uses images and nonverbal sounds, creating a lurid image of a man in hell. Macbeth, played by Hideyuki Hiraoka, appears sculpted in red light, shrouded in fog. To pulsing, percussive music and guttural sounds, he breaks from his frozen pose and moves a bamboo staff through a fluid series of slow-motion gestures, recalling both Butoh and the heroic poses of Kabuki samurai. In tattered black slips, the witches crawl through the audience hunting their prey. With Macbeth still upstage, they form a chorus downstage, performing a lewd, frenetic come-on. Thrusting hips and breasts frantically forward, then suddenly squatting obscenely, they tantalize and appall Macbeth, while chanting phrases from Shakespeare's text, alternately in Japanese and English.

As an expressionistic interpretation of character, this production elevates the witches' role. They are always present: often foregrounded downstage; sometimes twining themselves around characters; occasionally upstage observing, wrapped around the stark wickets of the stage design. When Macbeth and Banquo encounter them, the witches dance their prophecies; and Macbeth stands, eyes growing wildly wide, as the seeds of ambition take root. Macbeth delivers soliloquies contemplating the king's death in Japanese with the witches, sometimes crawling up his legs like serpents, repeating key phrases in English, representing his inner tension. Later, as the dagger surfaces in Macbeth's mind, they ensnare him in a net of bamboo staves. As emanations of his lust for power, they dance a ritual murder of the king while Macbeth kneels downstage in darkness bent by the music's driving percussion.

Lady Macbeth, too, serves expressionistic ends, more an emanation of Macbeth than an independent character. Throughout, the production links Macbeth, his partner, and the witches, creating a union of evil. He remains on stage as she reads his letter about the prophesies. Stripping the text to the “unsex me here” speech completes the chain of evil, linking Lady Macbeth visually with the witches. In a slow-motion recapitulation of their squatting earlier, she intones her lines about infernal motherhood. Helen Smith's Lady Macbeth squats as if to ditch deliver evil into the world; hands become claws as she encourages the murdering ministers to take her milk for gall. The sleepwalking scene turns into a ballet for the damned. Intoning only “Out, damned spot,” Smith's Lady Macbeth pirouettes into hell to percussive piano and drums, while the witches mouth fragments of her speech, English echoing Japanese. During Macbeth's “tomorrow” soliloquy, she remains on stage. Standing midway on a runway slanting from the back of the auditorium to the stage, Macbeth groans in Japanese while Lady Macbeth, arms outstretched, hovers above him, echoing his soliloquy in English like an infernal benediction on her doomed husband.

What is striking about this production is the power it draws from its roughness, the pulsing musical score, and the group's commitment to experimentation. An avowed experiment in cross-cultural cross-fertilization, it has what by conventional standards might be called artistic flaws. For example the banquet scene unsuccessfully mixes comedy and horror in a kind of youthful nose-thumbing at the Ur-text's sacrosanct cultural status. But even this overindulgence in conflicting effects reflects the group's vitality and commitment to a style that is internationalist in perspective because it is “beyond words.”

This performance strives for the elemental power of myth to comment on the contemporary scene. Stripping Shakespeare's Macbeth to essentials, it presents an icon of human depravity, a character daring to be more than a man, devoid of pathos, unclouded by morality. It transforms Shakespeare's Macbeth through bilingual collages, Butoh techniques, and music, into a fast moving, visceral reflection of the primitive, pan-cultural desire for power. The simple bamboo staves used effectively throughout as agents of destruction and fate are universalizing signs suggesting the technological extensions of power whether swords, AK-47s, sarin gas, or plastic explosives. In the process, this performance reminds us that Sarajevo, Tokyo, and Oklahoma City are all worlds where Macbeth's avatars walk with ravishing stride.