Theatre of Japan

Kyōgen, its comic partner, served as a link between the theological themes of the Noh play with the pedestrian world by use of theatrical farce and slapstick.

Like Noh, however, over time, kabuki developed heavily into a set art form, with importance given to preserving the integrity of certain plays, down to using the same costume designs used several centuries ago.

A number of variants existed: Japanese modern drama in the early 20th century consisted of shingeki (experimental Western-style theatre), which employed naturalistic acting and contemporary themes in contrast to the stylized conventions of kabuki and Noh.

In the post-war period, there was a phenomenal growth in creative new dramatic works, which introduced fresh aesthetic concepts that revolutionized the orthodox modern theatre.

Challenging the realistic, psychological drama focused on "tragic historical progress" of the Western-derived shingeki, young playwrights broke with such accepted tenets as conventional stage space, placing their action in tents, streets, and open areas located all over Tokyo.

Playwrights returned to common stage devices perfected in Noh and kabuki to project their ideas, such as employing a narrator, who could also use English for international audiences.

In contrast, the fiercely independent Murai Shimako who won awards throughout the world for her numerous works focusing on the Hiroshima bombing, performed plays with only one or two actresses.

In this time period, women began to run their own theater companies such as Kishida Rio, Kisaragi Koharu, Nagai Ai, and Watanabe Eriko.

[1][2] Tadashi Suzuki developed a unique method of performer training which integrated avant-garde concepts with classical Noh and kabuki techniques, an approach that became a major creative force in Japanese and international theatre in the 1980s.

Another highly original east–west fusion occurred in the inspired production Nastasya, adapted from Dostoevsky's The Idiot, in which Bando Tamasaburo, a famed kabuki onnagata (female impersonator), played the roles of both the prince and his fiancée.

[3] With the success of the Seibidan troupe, however, shinpa theater ended up with a form that was closer to kabuki than to the later shingeki because of its continued use of onnagata and off-stage music.

[3] As a theatrical form, it was most successful in the early 1900s as the works of novelists such as Kyōka Izumi, Kōyō Ozaki, and Roka Tokutomi were adapted for the stage.

[5][6] Many classics of the western canon from Ancient Greek theatre, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky to Samuel Beckett are performed in Tokyo today.