“To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores”: Shakespeare in the World

Appropriately enough, translation has become a crucial element of Shakespeare's global legacy. On one hand, the formal features of his poetry may seem difficult to translate across languages. On the other hand, Shakespeare's oeuvre is greater than just words. What has captivated audiences for centuries is his larger-than-life portrayal of philosophical questions that resonate across the spectrum of humanity. Since the 16th century, his plays and sonnets have been translated and performed all over the world in an ever-growing number of languages, dialects, and styles. With more than four billion copies of his works sold, Shakespeare is one of the most translated secular authors in the world. In the past fifty years, perhaps as part of post–Cold War campaigns for soft power, arts festivals and directors in many countries have presented Shakespeare's plays as part of their quest for cosmopolitanism.

Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa (1935–2016) emerged in this context. He is one of the few people in the world to have directed all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, a task he began in 1997 as the artistic director of the prestigious Sai-no-kuni Shakespeare series. (He directed Hamlet, a play that has had over a hundred different translations in Japanese, six times). And he presented the plays in Japanese, not only by translating the texts but also by translating cultural and aesthetic references. He also directed English-language productions of Shakespeare in London, including King Lear, starring Sir Nigel Hawthorne. In 1980, his production of Macbeth, which has become a landmark production in world theater, premiered at Tokyo's prestigious Nissei Theatre before touring globally. The venue carries historical significance because it also hosted the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1973 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Peter Brook, when Ninagawa was just beginning to work with European and American dramas. Brook's production—which has been described as one of the 20th century's most influential productions of Shakespeare—prompted Ninagawa to take an even more remarkably auteurist approach to stage work. Like Brook, who regarded theater as iconographic art, and filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, who combined Noh, American Western, and Japanese scroll painting in his Throne of Blood (an adaptation of Macbeth), Ninagawa often worked from a set of compelling images for each production as if he were a designer.

Ninagawa's Macbeth earned the nickname "the cherry blossom Macbeth" for the visual motif that dominates the production. Inspired by the Japanese author Motojirō Kajii's (1901–1932) widely circulated phrase "Dead bodies are buried under the cherry trees," Ninagawa's Macbeth associates death with a cherry tree in full blossom, symbolizing both beauty and mortality, and the repose of the soul. A cherry tree and its falling petals adorn many of the key scenes in the play, providing an uncanny link between extreme forms of violence and beauty. Shifting moods and emotions are marked by changes in season, and the color and motif of cherry blossoms appear on the panels upstage, on the costumes of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and in the lighting scheme. Spring turns to autumn as Macbeth wades through blood in his campaign for power. In the prophesied movement of "Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill," soldiers carry boughs of cherry trees in place of Shakespeare's original oak. The swaying boughs—replete with literary associations with religious sacrifice—threaten Macbeth with death, if not hara-kiri (honorable samurai-style suicide), and remind the audience of the transient world and a Buddhist sense of resignation. The ideas of impermanence and an inevitable fall are ingrained in the highest ideal of a samurai, which is why the falling cherry blossoms provide such a compelling subtext.

An eclectic mix of music from different eras and cultures echoes Ninagawa's hybrid visual strategies, with the use of both Christian music and Japanese gongs signaling a world elsewhere. The opening scene features temple bells and the Fauré Requiem, and a lone flute later accentuates Macbeth's action as he persuades assassins to go after Banquo. This arrangement gives the production a religious undertone, while also highlighting the story's pathos. Fauré's gentle and shimmering Sanctus echoes Ninagawa's visual cherry blossom motif, and the director's own rehearsal notes usefully sum up the significance of the dominant visual and sonic frameworks: "Memories of cherry blossom at night [morph into] a sensuous invitation to death."