FringeReview UK 2024

Good-Bye

Osamu Dazai/Chiten Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Biographical Drama, Contemporary, Experimental, International, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre, Translation

Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“Only when perfectly happy has one the right to commit suicide.” Thus Osamu Dazai (1909-48) quotes Paul Valéry in his suicidal 1948 unfinished novel Good-Bye.

Together with a collage of his other works – notably excerpts from his last two finished novels The Setting Sun and No Longer Human – this fragmentary 36-page long novel is the spine of an adaptation by Chiten Theatre. Directed by founder Motoi Miura, its six-strong ensemble with a seventh young actor and the three-strong Kukangendai band arrives at the Coronet till March 9^th.

It’s a phenomenal spectacle, in keeping with Chiten’s determinedly anti-naturalistic aesthetic. Any relation to postwar Japan is refracted through the text itself: two surtitle monitors that translate what the actors chant. For quite a while it’s “good-bye” in a nagging litanic chant, like “cheers”.

We’re presented with Itaru Sugiyama’s set: a long bar with bottles along the table top, seven barstools and the actors jumping up on top of the table, and down; huge bottles brandished, occasionally venturing a little downstage.

Behind them, towering behind an opaque glass, the band play a curious uber-cool jazzy ten-note riff it’s difficult to get out of your head. Eight tied notes end in two extended ones, particularly the last.

Sometimes that’s amplified with pre-recorded voices, in Bunsho Nishikawa’s sound system around the auditorium. Yasuhiro Fujiwara’s lighting bathes the actors in violet or mint or even red, with stadium effect lights behind the band that occasionally blaze straight into the audience’s eyes. It’s not so much 1940s as 1990s, or 2000s: more Haruki Murakami’s world, and ours, than Dazai’s.

Despite his career-long leaning into suicide, Dazai is the great jester of Japanese 20^th century literature, whose literary career reached its brief apogee post-war where he anatomised Japan’s defeat – something Miura states Japan has still not come to terms with.

Dazai himself seems to disaster along left-wing activity and suicide bids, which killed two women: his first at 22, where the 19-year-old wife he’d just spent an adulterous night with succeeded as he failed. He relates this. And finally by drowning, with a young woman he’d left his wife and lover for, both nursing his children.

In between Dazai relates a grotesquely comic, poetic double suicide-bid with tablets. It involves the woman planning to hang herself in her stupor by rolling off a cliff: that fails.

This might paint a misogynistic picture, and indeed the plot of Good-Bye hardly allays that. But Dazai’s story of self-disgust is symptomatic of a strain of Japanese culture: it’s complicated and Daai’s bitterly self-aware and mercilessly self-critical. Didn’t stop him though.

Not that the actors wish you any such reaction: the sheer physical blast, choral shouts, fragmentary snatches from Dazai’s fiction relayed like a ritual across the band’s backbeat, mesmerise and lull you. Sometimes they bludgeon and skirl as formalised laughter and the choreographed banging down of two bottles per actor accentuate the beat.

There’s no distinction made in roles, or where there is not even reviewers – provided with an electronic document which the audience might not be – can tell who takes on the choral lead. One who does uses Dazai’s original name – Shüji Tsushima – underscoring his autobiographical, even transparent confessional fictions.

Each black-clad actor (in Colette Huchard’s subtly-various costume design) inhabits a segment of Dazai, twirls and wisps words away in the smoke of cabaret.

Satoko Abe, Dai Ishida, Masaya Kishimoto, Shie Kubota, Asuka Kurosawa, Yohei Kobayashi, Kazuki Masuda all take up the refrain, some leading more than others. At one point towards the end the three women are left onstage to relay a single-gendered truth.

The kernel of the fragmentary Good-Bye is a man bent on suicide who enlists the help of a powerful, aggressive woman to help him say goodbye to each of his ten lovers: without letting them come on to him for one last sexual embrace. Dazai’s alter ego certainly rates himself.

Despite this curiously mocking framework, the overall effect – and distention of other material – is a mix of ironic celebration and a drunken evening: actors progressively gesture to one long drinking bout.

It’s again not a naturalistic collective bender, but a verbal disinhibition: where fragments swirl, litanic repetition comes round and round with different emphases like a drunk’s story; but everything naturally with a garish restraint.

“Only God, uniquely can truly love.” Dazai’s text comes over curiously pristine, with its source bracketed below in a scholarly manner removed from the gig-like delivery.

Since we’re mostly not familiar with Dazai, this won’t outrage us. And since he’s so popular in Japan, it’s just another way of looking at a few classics with new eyes, the stories of which are so-well known.

With the climax growing louder, we’re confronted with Japan’s synchronous relation to 1948 and now: it’s one of drunken stasis and denial. Dazai, suicidal jester, comes across as landing a nihilistic slap in the face, again and again. Wholly absorbing, wholly other, it’s a gem of the Coronet’s dedication to world theatre.

Published March 9, 2024 by Simon Jenner