The Japanese Theatre
demons, and goblins would be impossible elsewhere. In the play of “Honest Sebi” there was a murder scene in a bamboo grove in a rainy twilight that neither Henry Irving nor Jules Claretie could have surpassed; and in “The Vampire Cat of the Nabeshima,” or “The Enchanted Cat of the Tokaido,” a beautiful young woman changed, before the eyes of the audience, to a hideous monster, with a celerity more ghastly than that which transforms Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.
Japanese theatres use the revolving stage, which has been their original and unique possession for two centuries. A section of the stage flooring, twenty or thirty feet in diameter, revolves like a railway turn-table, on lignum-vitæ wheels, moved by coolies below stairs, who put their shoulders to projecting bars, as with the silk-press. The wings come to the edge of this circle, and at a signal a whole house whirls around and shows its other rooms or its garden. Sometimes the coolies turn too quickly, and the actors are rolled out of sight gesticulating and shouting. The scenery is painted on wings that draw aside, or on flies hoisted overhead. Curiously enough, the signal for opening the curtain is the same as that used at the Comédie Française—three blows on the floor with a big stick.
The Japanese theatre of to-day is given over to realism and the natural school, and Jefferson and Coquelin are not more quietly, easily, and entirely the characters they assume than Danjiro, their Japanese fellow-Thespian. The play is a transcript of actual life, and everything moves in an every-day way, though Japanese manners and customs often seem stilted, artificial, and unnatural to the brusque Occidental, with his direct and brutally practical etiquette. Pathos is always deep and long drawn out, and the last tear is extracted from the eyes of audiences quick to respond to emotional appeals. Tragedies are very tragic and murders very sanguinary.
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