The prospect of some evenings in the theatre is daunting. Although directed by the RSC’s confident new artistic director Gregory Doran, this three-hour play, performed in both English and Japanese with surtitles, covers a little-known period of Japanese history 400 years ago.
I was preparing for brain-ache but the piece turns out to be a delight, surprisingly humorous as well as extremely touching at points. It’s as though co-writers Mike Poulton and Shoichiro Kawai have taken the template of a Shakespeare history play and superimposed dashes of plot from Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures and The King and I.
In 1600 William Adams (Stephen Boxer), an English sailor in a Dutch ship, is shipwrecked off Japan, the first Englishman to reach that country. Taken to meet suspicious Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa (Masachika Ichimura), Adams, wryly amused at the cultural differences he sees, makes a good impression. Ieyasu decides not to behead him and thus begins Adams’s assimilation into the hierarchical Japanese court, as well as the start of a lengthy and respectful friendship between the two men.
The other major plot strand concerns the bellicose factions of Japan’s ruling families. I must confess that the intricacies of these decades-long conflicts were occasionally lost on me. Battle scenes provide opportunities aplenty to admire some impressive martial millinery and elsewhere we learn of the struggle for both commercial and religious supremacy by the dominant imperial powers of the day, England and Spain.
It’s directed with assurance by Doran, even if some scenes are slightly perfunctory, and Boxer and Ichimura become a gravitas-packed central pairing. The Shogun and the English Samurai (also the play’s subtitle) grow to understand each other’s languages and converse trippingly — which must have taken some rehearsal — in English and Japanese. There’s fine support from Yuki Furukawa as a young monk who befriends Adams. Engrossing.
Until February 9 (0844 412 4300, sadlerswells.com)
