Noh play to great

What's been good about this year is that I've been nervous about everything; it's important to terrify yourself,' says director Jonathan Kent, cheerily.

He's had plenty to be scared about. After his surprise decision last year to step down with Ian McDiarmid as joint artistic directors of Islington's Almeida Theatre after 12 years, Kent's done opera in Santa Fe, a Broadway musical and a Japaneselanguage production of Hamlet, about to open at Sadler's Wells.

'It was important to rule a line under the Almeida,' he says. 'It was also me launching myself into the unknown.'

Clearly not one to shirk a challenge, Kent was offered the chance to direct a play in Japanese when he took the Almeida productions of Richard II and Coriolanus to Japan.

'The obvious question is how can I direct in a language I can't speak,' he admits. 'Hamlet is arguably the greatest language play in the canon, but I was astonished by what transcends language. But then the greatest theatre I've seen has been Shakespeare in foreign languages. If you can't follow a play by word, your imagination has to do the work.'

Shakespeare has always resonated with Japanese audiences: from Akira Kurosawa's epic film versions Ran and Throne Of Blood, to Yukio Ninagawa's ambitious stagings, including this year's Pericles at the National.

'Traditional Noh [masked theatre] is all about ghosts coming back to exact revenge and laying to rest the ghosts of past lives. And honour, thanks to the samurai tradition, is more familiar to the Japanese than it is to us,' he explains.

The Japanese style of acting - more presentational and rhetorical - has enabled him to highlight other aspects of Hamlet, too.

'So much of the play is about "seeming"; it's about the illusory and artificial nature of power. What I hope we've created is an artificial world - made more so by men playing women - which is punctured.'

Ah yes, the all-male cast. Although these days in this country, womenfree Shakespeare productions are a comparative curiosity, in Japan theatre is still a totally masculine pursuit.

Leading Japanese actor and kyogen theatre practitioner Nomura Mansai has taken the title role. 'His family have been kyogen actors for 300 years and he is the heir apparent, so he understands about being a crown prince,' Kent explains.

Kyogen is a robust, comic form of theatre, like commedia dell'arte; how does it fit into the mix? 'I've got kabuki actors, kyogen actors, Noh theatre, and I think I've got a Western feel. I don't want to give the impression it's something completely radical, but it's people from different schools coming together.'

It's certainly an opportune time for Kent's experimentation: apart from

Ninagawa's Pericles, the Barbican recently staged Complicite's The Elephant Vanishes to good reviews (another case of an Englishspeaking director tackling a Japaneselanguage production).

Now all that remains is to persuade London's theatre-goers to give this a try, too: but Kent thrives on such challenges. His proudest moments at the Almeida were his Shakespeare productions in the dilapidated Gainsborough Studios, and taking Racine to the West End.

It's the irritation of two alien forms meeting that creates interesting theatre: the sand in the oyster,' he says. 'People's imaginations are caught if you twist it. I just hope Hamlet in Japanese is not an imaginative leap too far.'

Hamlet, Thu until Sept 6, Sadler's Wells, Rosebery Avenue EC1, Mon to Sat 7.15pm (except Fri 29 7pm), Sept 6 mat 2.30pm, £10 to £30.

Tel: 020 7863 8000. www.sadlerswells.com Tube: Angel