ABSTRACT
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear and Macbeth are the ones that Suzuki Tadashi has made most his own, both in the frequency of his staging and, more literally, through adaptation. (He has staged versions of Lear in 1984 and every year from 1988 to 2006; versions of Macbeth were staged in 1975, 1978, and almost every year from 1992 to 2001.) Two adaptations of Hamlet (1972 and 1989) and one of Romeo and Juliet (1993-1995) can be added to the list, but this is all.1 Whereas Ninagawa’s engagements with Shakespeare are extensive, Suzuki’s are intensive. This is because, as he has explained in interview,
[t]he ‘Suzuki style’ includes the formal presentation of the inner world of a character possessed by illusions, and the acting style that supports that structure . . . That is why there is a limit on the number of plays to which it can be applied. But some parts of Shakespeare’s works do seem to me to lend themselves very well to it.2
