Chikamatsu Project
We stage the English adaptation of Imamiya no Shinju (Lovers' Suicides at Imamiya) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon in collaboration with student casts majoring in theatre at the University of Hull, UK, and under the direction of Masako Yuasa, who has energetically worked on many productions of classical or contemporary plays. As a part of the Chikamatsu Project, this production is going to be given in Osaka, Tokyo, and Edinburgh (where we will participate in the Edinburgh Festival), which shows that it has an aspect of an international cultural project.
Lovers' Suicides at Imamiya is the third production of the Chikamatsu Project. The project, which started in 2004, carried out the first production of Chikamatsu's work, Woman-Killer in Oil Hell, in March, 2004, collaborating with the Workshop Theatre of University of Leeds, UK. The second Production was Tsuzumi-drumbeats over the Horikawa in 2006.
The ultimate goal of this project is to add Chikamatsu's plays to a repertoire of the world theatre, such as Shakespeare's and Chekhov's work. For this goal, we have been working on the stage productions of Chikamatsu's plays in English.
We expect that students from UK, through staging Chikamatsu's plays, would learn gestures or movements of body peculiar to historical plays of Japan and capture the true soul of Japanese traditional theatre. The students participating in this project are promising youths for the next generation of British theatre, and it is no doubt that they will make Chikamatsu's plays even more interesting.
This production will offer the Japanese audience a chance of seeing Chikamatsu' play from a different angle from when it is presented in Japanese, and this will expand and deepen their insights into Chikamatsu's plays still more. So, don't miss it.