ENGLISH KABUKI
MEITOKU INTERNATIONAL PLAYERS
presented
KANJINCHO
THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST
On Friday, 24 June, 2011
at Haruno Bunka Hall Pia Stage, Kochi City
ENGLISH KABUKI
MEITOKU INTERNATIONAL PLAYERS
presented
KANJINCHO
THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST
On Friday, 24 June, 2011
at Haruno Bunka Hall Pia Stage, Kochi City
This is the famous Kabuki play performed by leading Kabuki actor
KOSHIRO MATSUMOTO more than 1,000 times.
Famous for its character of Benkei, who improvises words from a blank scroll and savagely beats his own master Yoshitsune (disguised as a porter) in order to save him from capture by his jealous elder brother Yoritomo.
Newly adapted by GAVIN BANTOCK, who also directed, the story is completely recast in a ‘Shakespearean’ style and set in Italy of the Middle Ages. Italy at that time was a loose group of warring states as Japan was at the time of the Kanjincho story.
KOSHIRO MATSUMOTO kindly wrote a note in the programme about this production,
and approved of this method of presenting the play in a Western idiom. GB and KB
visited Koshiro at the Kabuki theatre at Kotohira in Kagawa Prefecture earlier in 2011.