Toshiki Okada is a playwright who has won acclaim for the language in his plays, which has been described as "super-real" verbal Japanese for the way the characters speak in abbreviated sentences that are little more than a succession of conjunctions without verbalized subjects, like fragments from the conversations of private life. The performances he presents with his theatre unit chelfitsch are characterized by a unique body language that has even become the object of attention from the contemporary dance world. We spoke with Okada about his adventurous new world of verbal expression and the "physical richness" he seeks to express.

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About the year I graduated, I did experience a major turning point when I read the book For Contemporary Colloquial Theater by Oriza Hirata. I believe what Hirata was saying is that it is strange if there is any self-consciousness in the words when an actor is speaking his or her lines, and that theory of acting and theatre influenced me very much. I think this is the point of origin for what I am doing now. Before I read the book, I had taken part in a two-day workshop by Hirata. I was very much inspired by his method of diverting the actor's consciousness of the script by intentionally placing some kind of physical burden on the actor.

What do you mean by a physical burden on the actor?

One example is having two conversations going on at the same time on stage. While the actor is talking to someone on this side of the stage, there is another conversation going on across the stage, so the actor has to move his part of the script along while also reacting to the other conversation...that kind of situation. This is definitely an easily apparent way of splitting the actor's consciousness of the script.

At the same time there was another book I read that had quite an impact on me, which I found very interesting. It was Bertolt Brecht's book Can the theatre reproduce the current world?. I was very much inspired by his criticism of the idea of "the fourth wall" (that visible boundary between the stage and the audience, the idea that the actors are conscious of this fourth wall).

For me there was a smooth and natural connection between what Brecht was saying and what Hirata was saying. It is very clear to me that Brecht and Hirata are the starting point, the foundation of what I am doing now.

From this you invented the unique script language that is now being called "super-real verbal Japanese". What was the process that led to this?

One of the things that led me to start writing these scripts full of inarticulate lines, these lines that never seem to get to the point, clearly came from my experience from a part-time job I had once of transcribing the contents of interview tapes. The tapes were from interviews with local people in regional communities, conducted by a think tank seeking ways to stimulate the culture and economies of the communities.

Making the transcripts was a tedious job, but at the same time there was something very interesting about it. That was because as you transcribed it word for word, you couldn't understand what the people were trying to say. But somehow, by the end of the conversation it began to make sense and you could see what they had been trying to say, even though their words themselves were not saying anything clearly or articulately. This surprising realization was an important one for me.

However, when I am writing a play I don't use the technique of transcribing from tapes of spoken conversations. I write it all myself. So, some people might say I should try to write scripts that are more articulate. But if I did that, part of what is important to me would be lost. I reproduce the real, inarticulate way that average people actually speak, because one of the things I want to express is what lies within that ineptness, the larger content.

Is it that you want the audience to experience the fascination of being able to understand the overall gist of what is being said even though the individual details of what is said are virtually incomprehensible?

More than that, there is the fact that this is what our verbal life is actually like. That is the important thing to me. What I am saying is "Isn't this the way we actually speak?" Of course, it is possible to criticize this kind of verbal life, but I have no interest in saying whether it is good or bad, or criticizing it. We are actually living in this kind of verbal environment. Some people might say that since we are living in such an inarticulate world, we should at least try to use articulate Japanese in our theatre. But I think that is rather a limited attitude. To me this Japanese that people actually use is even richer and more positive.

Your type of real Japanese where one sentence runs into the next without break and the subjects are deleted from the sentences until you are uncertain who the subject is anymore, this also gives the script an aspect of ambiguity.

There is a separate point of departure behind that aspect. For the festival held at the Yokohama ST Spot, I wrote a solo-actor play titled On the Harmful Effects of Marijuana playing on the title of the Chekhov play On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco. At the time I got the idea of how interesting it would be if someone who is talking about a friend gradually goes through a transformation to become the friend himself. Since then, I came to write plays where several characters would go through this kind of transformation process. Behind this idea there is also a novel by William Faulkner. In the novel Absalom, Absalom!, the characters are reflected in the writing style, and I thought that this device would be even more interesting and effective I used in theatre.

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I believe that there is a fictional aspect to the work of writing a play...

In terms of the work of the playwright, the compositional aspect, what I am thinking about is continuance. I don't create an overall scenario outline before I begin writing a play. That is because the most important thing for me is that there should be true continuity in the way one scene leads into the next.

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Do you consciously think about the rhythm of your scripts? When I read the script itself, it has a very rhythmical feeling to it.

That is not something I am conscious of when I write. A play is something that is intended to be spoken. So it should be something that you want to recite aloud and something that gains meaning when said out loud. To say that you feel a rhythm when you are just reading the text silently is nice to hear, but I reject any type of deliberate rhythmical bodily presentation of the script lines when the play is actually staged. I believe that the body of the actor should have a unique movement that is separate from the rhythm of the script. Whether or not you feel rhythm when you are reading the text silently or not has nothing to do with what I am trying to achieve when I write.

In addition to the unique character of your scripts, we also see very unique body movement by the actors in your plays.

This goes back to the influence I received from Oriza Hirata, about diverting the consciousness of the lines by shifting consciousness to the body. In this respect I have continued to follow Hirata's example. But, just as focusing too much attention of the words kills them, shifting too much attention to the body movement also kills the body presence. Therefore, you can't shift the consciousness to the body either. So, where should you focus the consciousness...? To explain what comes next is very difficult, and we can speak in terms of image or signifié (thing to be signified), but in essence what I mean is that there must be something within the human being that precedes the script or the bodily expression. When you say something or make a gesture, there must be some underlying reason, something inside that is the origin. That is where I want to take the consciousness. That is what I am now encouraging the actors to develop within themselves in the studio when we practice and rehearse. (...)

All I am saying is that having a source within where every word or movement originates is an extremely essential element of theatre. (...) I believe that acting in a way where the lines are spoken on the basis of an image gained from the script is completely wrong. What I am talking about is the image in the internal point of origin of all words and movements.

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Earlier you mentioned that you were influenced by Brecht. In your play Five Days in March that won the Kishida Award, the motif is the Iraq War. It seems that you have some thoughts about the deep relationship between reality and theatre and the function of theatre in the real world.

I think these are questions that should be answered separately. First of all, let's set the Iraq War aside and talk about theatre's role in the real world. I feel ill at ease with the idea that because theatre takes place in the closed space of the hall, it can be treated as a world of fiction. Shall we say the lie of the "fourth wall". In fact, the audience is there and the duration of the play is a time that is shared with the audience. Said in another way, I don't think that theatre comes apart if you remove that fourth wall.

As for the other question, I would like to say something about what I was thinking at the time of Five Days in March. I was thinking that I wanted to say something about war, for example I feel that committing ourselves to anti-war movements doesn't seem to fit us. Still we do have some feelings. We have this attitude that involves concern with some degree of distance, but it is not that we are not concerned. That is the idea that I wanted to show, involving that distance. Some people see this as a work showing young people who have no concern at all about the war and are only interested in sex, but I personally think of this as a firm anti-war play.

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Hirofumi Okano