ABSTRACT
This essay will focus on Meyerhold’s influence on the modern development of Japanese theatre. It investigates the ways Meyerhold’s ideas and practices impacted the historical formation of modern Japanese theatre and the ways his ideas and practices were revered, reviled, and refracted in the service of their different theatrical, ideological, and sociopolitical missions. At the same time, it demonstrates that Meyerhold’s approach to traditional Japanese theatre was instrumental in the conversion of those erstwhile Japanese radical reformers and destructionists of their own theatrical traditions into some devout ‘traditionalists’ who struggled to define the future of a modern Japanese national(ist) theatre. The essay focuses on Osanai Kaoru and Hijikata Yoshi, two leading figures of modern Japanese theatre, and their intricate approaches to Meyerhold’s influence. It shows that Meyerhold’s complex (inter)relationship with the past and the present of Japanese theatre is a classic example of the ‘intercultural’ dialogue in and between traditions and modernities, where the artistic and the aesthetic were inexorably interlaced with the ideological and the political.
