My time with Ninagawa

Yukio Ninagawa. Photograph: Mika Ninagawa

When I first saw Yukio Ninagawa’s Medea at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1986, I never imagined it would be the start of a relationship that only death would sever 30 years later.

I met with Ninagawa’s producer, Tadao Nakane, the day after I had seen the performance. (Nakane was with us until his retirement and was followed by Miyako Kanamori of HoriPro Inc, who has become Associate Producer for my own company.) Nakane said on behalf of Ninagawa that he was going to be rather cheeky. He wanted to bring two productions to International 87, the festival throughout that year that I was producing at the National Theatre for Peter Hall. I went to see the Ninagawa Macbeth and then I really was hooked. So we scheduled Medea for the National Theatre's Olivier stage and Macbeth for the Lyttelton. For our theatregoers it was the start of a love affair that continues to this day.

Ninagawa had been an actor, although his original career path had been as a painter. Rejection in that area meant he was able to display his considerable visual imagination on the stage. This, combined with music (frequently culled from the classical world), lighting and sound, made him a theatrical Pied Piper who could carry us into the world that was his mise en scène.

Macbeth. Photograph: Seigo Kiyota

Inevitably with work on the scale of Ninagawa productions there were problems, and in the early days, we needed as much help as we could get. Even the number of personnel involved in a Ninagawa production could be mind-boggling. We could always rely on support from the British Council and they smoothed our diplomatic paths through our early encounters in Japan with warmth and generosity.

Macbeth was well known to the UK audience, Medea less so. At that time we were using simultaneous translation, which I had always thought an intrusion on a performance. It became very clear that our audience, having hired their headset for the night, listened for the first 10 minutes, and then abandoned it. The images and sounds told them everything they needed to know. Ninagawa had as intense a dislike of simultaneous translation as I had. Our solution was to use the voice of our actor friends (amongst them Vanessa Redgrave and Alan Rickman) to speak via the auditorium’s PA system, reading a synopsis of the first half as the lights went down. After the interval we repeated this process, and we hoped our audience would be able to hold the action of the play in their memory.

Alan played the leading role in Ninagawa’s first English language production, Tango at the End of Winter by Kunio Shimizu. Subsequently, Michael Sheen played the title role in Peer Gynt, which Frank McGuiness adapted from Ibsen and Nigel Hawthorne gave his farewell stage performance in Ninagawa’s King Lear. Ninagawa then did his only English language Hamlet with Michael Maloney.

King Lear. Photograph: Takahiro Watanabe

It was a mystery to onlookers as to how Ninagawa and I communicated. In the early days, he used an interpreter. His early life as an actor helped him to communicate with people who did not speak Japanese. His English improved somewhat over the years, but not a lot because he didn’t need it.

Ninagawa remains part of a small but significant peer group of great international directors that includes Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Peter Brook, Peter Stein and Ingmar Bergman. Despite his love affair with Shakespeare, it is not only his Shakespeare productions that have thrilled us. Most recently, we brought his version of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore to the Barbican in 2015, which has become his London home. It subsequently played New York, and his productions have made regular visits to the USA.

He continued to invent things that are normally in the realm of younger directors. As an actor himself he encouraged others to search for something new all the time (witness his eight productions of Hamlet). He might incorporate the Western styles of Artaud or Grotowsky as well as the Japanese traditions of Noh and Kabuki, but his work always had the indelible Ninagawa stamp.

It is a great solace for me and appropriate that although we have now lost him, he has not gone very far. In October 2017, his magnificent production of Macbeth, a reprise of the original from nearly forty years ago, with the same creative team, will be seen at the Barbican and Theatre Royal Plymouth, exactly 30 years since it first played in London at the National Theatre. I know that his UK audience will be waiting for this glorious celebration of his work.

Thelma Holt has her own production company, Thelma Holt Ltd, and was Head of Touring and Commercial Exploitation at the National Theatre for many years. She is Hon. Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

See the work:

> Ninagawa’s Macbeth tours to the Barbican, London and Theatre Royal Plymouth in autumn 2017.

> OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society), whose international tours were started by Thelma Holt, will tour the UK with a work by Ninagawa in summer 2017.