shingeki

…of the founders of the shingeki (“new drama”) movement, which introduced the plays of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw to Japan and provided an outlet for modern plays by Japanese authors. In 1915 he retired from Waseda University to devote his time to his translation of Shakespeare.

The first modern play (shingeki) to be staged in Japan in the Western realistic manner was Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, directed by Osanai Kaoru in 1909 at his Free Theatre, which was modeled on the “free theatres” of Europe. Much to the detriment of shingeki’s development, major European playwrights—George…

Shingeki’s orthodox realism, its increasing commercialism, and its impotence during the struggle to block the 1960 passage of the United States–Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security alienated younger theatre artists. In the 1960s, for both political and artistic reasons, director-authors Suzuki Tadashi, Terayama Shūji,…