ABSTRACT
The chapter investigates recent productions by two cutting-edge Japanese directors based on Sophocles’ Antigone and applying its subject—the inability to mourn—to post-‘Fukushima’ Japan. I situate Matsuda Masataka’s Record of a Journey to Antigone (2012) in the artist’s development toward increasing experimentation with dramatic form and his growing interest in the realm of dreams and ghosts, and reveal the play’s proximity to Noh, a genre that is known for fathoming the borderlands between life and death. The analysis of Takayama’s Kein Licht II (No Light, 2012) scrutinizes how the site-specific performance in Tokyo’s Shinbashi succeeded in communicating a sense of the disaster zone with an immediacy that was rare among the numerous post-3.11 plays. (115 words)
