REVIEW: Rashomon @ Shaw Festival

[David Akin]

RASHOMON. By Fay and Michael Kanin. Based on stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
Directed
by Neil Munro. Designed by Leslie Frankish. Lights by Kevin Lamotte. Music
by Christopher
Donison. Fights by John Nelles.
 
Priest..........................Greg Spottiswood
Woodcutter..................Roger Honeywell
Wigmaker....................Guy Bannerman
Bandit.........................Jim Mezon
Husband......................Nigel Shawn Williams
Wife............................Laurie Paton
 
NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. - Those two words together - murder mystery - have
such a
powerful hold on our collective imagination that they invariably disguise a
very basic fact about
violent deaths.
Violent deaths are grubby confused affairs with little romance and even less
passion. To call such
violent deaths mysteries is to inflate the significance of the act and to
begin to mytholigize the
victims and villains.
Rashomon, the Japanese fable centred around the violent death of a Samurai
lord which opened
Friday at the Shaw Festival here, is ostensibly a morality tale which
philosophizes on the essence
of objective and subjective truth. But in its Shaw Festival incarnation,
Rashomon is not nearly
such a weighty treatise. Instead, director Neil Munro's visually bold and
dramatically sparse vision
is little more than an indictment of society's fascination with murder and
its desire to demonize a
villain and purify a victim.
As those who have seen the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film will remember, Rashomon
is the same
story told four times over - once each from a different perspective.
To begin, a great and evil bandit is caught and confesses before the court
that is sure to hang
him that he killed a great Samurai lord after raping the man's wife. The
bandit, not surprisingly,
makes himself over as evil incarnate, a villain of monstrous proportions who
will defy death by
establishing for himself a mythic legacy.
His story bears little resemblance to the confessions of the wife, who,
after being raped in front of
her husband's eyes (he was bound to a tree during the deed) rejoices that
they are both alive
until she sees the hate and contempt in her husband's eyes. Unable to stand
his withering and
rejecting gaze, she kills him while the terrified bandit flees. In her own
eyes, she is the new idol in
the Cult of the Victim.
The dead man, too, gets his day in court. Speaking through a spirit-medium,
he paints himself as
the aggrieved party saying that the wife fell in love with the bandit after
the rape. The dead man
alleges that the wife ordered the bandit to kill him so that the wife could
be free of her marriage
bonds. If he is not a victim deserving pity and honor, who is?
Finally, the tale is re-told by a woodcutter who happened to witness the
entire affair hidden in
nearby bushes. Too scared to act then or tell his tale to the court, he
bears witness to a travelling
monk and a rogue wigmaker while they are waiting out a rainstorm under the
cover of the temple
of Rashomon.
In the Kurosawa movie, each version is told with enough ambiguity that the
viewer is indeed left
to ponder the nature of truth. But here, Munro quickly decides that truth
cannot be an absolute
so rather than let us compare the tales and sift each one for the real gold,
he makes sure that
three of the four versions seem so fantastic that they cannot possibly be
anything but fool's gold.
By making one seem right, he would convince us of its truth by making us
feel its honesty in our
bellies.
For Munro, it will not be logic and reason that define the truth, but the
collective consensus of the
witnesses. And in this production, the collective consensus quickly settles
on the woodcutter's
version.
"It has the smell of truth about it," says the woodcutter at the end of the
stories, as if to say we
must rely on instinct and not reason to determine what it is we will believe.
Even without the smell, it would be difficult to mistake the woodcutter's
tale for a fable.
The courtroom testimonies of the bandit, the wife, and the husband are
staged with unreal
effects. The bandit tells his tale while galloping through three-foot wide
red banners hung
dramatically about Leslie Frankish's verdant forest grotto set. The wife
drapes herself in a blood
red sash and tells her tale with bold poetic language. As if the point had
not yet been made, the
husband's spirit-medium is given fantastic surreality on the Festival Stage
as a 12-foot ghost who
rises high above the set and speaks with a booming echo.
The woodcutter's tale, by contrast, is played with a naturalism suitable for
any sitcom. The
husband and wife are a feuding couple with their petty quarrels while the
bandit is little more than
a lonely coward hiding in a hostile forest. The events that bring about the
husband's death are
little more than a bumbling accident brought on by petty jealousies and even
pettier fears. The
husband dies a death that is funny, pitiable, and, most of all, accidental,
almost fateful.
But is it mysterious? Is it humbling? Does it reveal truths about the human
condition? No.
For The Shaw Festival's main stage, which so frequently is filled with wordy
Shavian treatises on
complex philosophical issues, this highly-stylized production of Rashomon
seems but an
intellectual bauble, a weightless if beautiful law-and-order story that
seems destined to do little
more than cleanse the palate for this season's offerings by Shaw, Oscar
Wilde, J.M. Synge, and
Merrill Denison.
David Akin                      jdakin at foxnet.net
Staff Reporter                  VOX (807)343-6200
The Chronicle-Journal           FAX (807) 343-9409
Thunder Bay, Ontario            CANADA