“Five Days in March” by Toshiki Okada is certainly a milestone piece for Japanese theatre history. Premiering in 2004, the play was awarded the Kishida Kunio Drama Award, one of the most respected theatre awards in Japan, it has also been performed worldwide. The impact the play and theatre company has made on the Japanese theatre industry is indisputable, as it features in most discussions and lectures on contemporary Japanese theatre. That is why I took the one-and-a-half hour train ride to KAAT, The Kanagawa Arts Theatre to witness a recreation of “Five days in March” this December.
The play is carried out through a series of monologues, with a very conversational and unorganized narrative. At first, each character’s monologue tells a story that he or she has heard from someone else, but as they continue telling the stories, gradually the storytellers themselves become the protagonists. It is March 2003 and the US is about to declare war against Iraq, but in Shibuya, Tokyo, a city girl and a city boy head straight into a love hotel right after they meet for the first time at a live house. In the hotel, the couple spends 5 days continuously having sex. The very realistic conversational monologues combined with exaggerated gestures give the play an exquisite balance between reality and fiction, certainty and uncertainty. The play is performed in a theatre by professional actors, yet their idle body and language go against the performative language and body that an audience might expect to see on stage in the traditional sense. As a youth of 2017, the optimistic carelessness of the youth of 2003 did not stand out as realistic, but the idleness and irresponsibleness of the storytelling appealed realistic in the age of SNS when we have various devices and platforms to discharge our stories without careful editing. I still have a lot of digesting and researching to do to understand, or critically review this work, but this play was intriguing despite the dragged-on narrative, and I am convinced that this play must have been groundbreaking in 2003. This play might not be the first play that comes to my mind when recommending to non-theatre-goers, but if you have the patience and curiosity, I definitely recommend that you make the journey to see this work. This play will surely break any stereotypical preconceptions about theatre that you might have, and instead introduce you to a far more rich and strange world of theatre and performance art.
Significance: ★★★★★
Quality:★★★★★
Entertainment: ★
Load on the audiences: ★★★★★
For more info about the theatre company Chelfitsch, please refer here.