Actor, Role, and Character: Their Multiple Interrelationship in Kabuki

Author(s): Barbara E. Thornbury

Source: The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan., 1977),
pp. 31-40
Published by: Association of Teachers of Japanese
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489484 .
Accessed: 26/07/2011 18:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=atj. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Association of Teachers of Japanese is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese.

http://www.jstor.org
Journal of the Association Vol. XII, No. 1
of Teachers of Japanese January 1977

ACTOR, ROLEJ AND CHARACTER:

THEIR MULTIPLE INTERRELATIONSHIP
IN KABUKI*

BARARA E. THORNBURY

KABUKI IS a grand display of theatre, very appealing

to anyone's sense of a good show. But the significance
of Kabuki lies more deeply than this and the serious
theatregoer will inevitably be disappointed until he
can discover this significance through a workable
critical approach. This means viewing Kabuki in terms
of dramatic art in general, and as such, something
which can be understood by applying theories of the art
form.
At present, how far has criticism of Kabuki come?
To begin, there is a substantial amount of informa-
tion--mostly in Japanese, some in English and other
languages--on the origins and history of Kabuki, as well
as on the kind of costumes and make-up, music and sound
effects, and styles of acting that are used. Research
has been done on playwrighting and play structure,
categorizing--and to some extent--analyzing the func-
tionoof various dramatic and theatrical techniques
and conventions.
In trying to evaluate the plays and analyze what
happens during a performance, however, there has been
a tendency, especially among critics familiar with
both Western and Japanese theatrical traditions, to
describe Kabuki simply by comparing it to Western
theatre. At best we are told that Kabuki is a kind of
"total theatre"--in the sense that it uses so many
devices of theatrical presentation (including some that

31
32 BARBARA E. THORNBURY

are rarely or never seen on the Western stage). At

worst, we are told that it is a rather formless array
of music, dancing, and posturing by actors--a kind of
poor version of the American musical.
In effect, criticism of Kabuki has swung between
the over-adoration of those impressed by an "exotic
spectacle" and the under-rating of those who have not
been able to see further than the spectacle. This
predicament was summed up by the film director Eisen-
stein, who wrote the following in 1928, after a troupe
of Kabuki actors had visited Russia on one of their
first trips outside of Japan. "We have been visited
by the Kabuki theatre--a wonderful manifestation of
theatrical culture. Every critical voice gushes praise
for its splendid craftsmanship. But there has been
no appraisal of what constitutes its wonder."l In
general, Eisenstein's evaluation still holds true
today, even though almost fifty years have passed and
Kabuki has received increasing worldwide exposure.
Adequately describing the nature of any dramatic
art is not easy, of course, and it is indeed difficult
to avoid getting caught in a web of overly-simplified
comparisons. We must find instead an approach which
is workable from the standpoint of universal dramatic
theory; one that appears particularly interesting and
suitable for our purposes is a study of the interre-
lationship between actor, role, and character.
With this approach in mind, we may begin by look-
ing into a charge that is often leveled at Kabuki:
that Kabuki is actor-centered, but without meaningful
dramatic context.2 This is to say that the plays have
value only as vehicles for the actor's skill on the
stage, but on the whole are not significant in their
artistic conception. That Kabuki should be labeled
actor-centered is natural: all theatre is. But the
notion that it is without meaningful context only
reflects failure to understand its nature as a drama-
tic art.
If a play has a meaningful context, from what is
it derived? Is it from the plot? The characters?
In the Poetics Aristotle designated six separate parts
 KABUKI 33

of tragedy, plot and character being foremost. It

should be made clear that Aristotle separated plot and
character for purposes of analysis, not because they
really can be separated in the process of a play. As
Santayana has noted, "character can never be observed
. . . except as manifested in action."3 And what we
call plot, after all, is the way we describe that
action; it is an outline of the dramatic action.
But, then, how does character manifest this action?
When we talk about the characters in a play we are not
talking about isolated beings, but about beings which
interact. Hamlet would not be Hamlet without Ophelia,
without Gertrude, in short without the interaction of
the other characters.4 With the present popularity of
psychoanalytic theory, there is the temptation to
analyze a play by isolating characters from the play as
a whole and to treat them as if they were distinct
psychological entities. But as Bentley has said in his
chapter on Character in Life of the Drama:

While we have been brought up to believe that

what interests us in the life shown on stage is
the character of separate individuals, a factor
that probably does more to hold us fascinated is
the spectacle of a more adequate kind of communi-
cation with others, hence of relationship with
others, than we can find in life.5

Assuming that the interest of a play does lie in

the interactions of the characters, in what way are
actors related to these characters? In the modern
realistic tradition it can be said that the actor's
duty is to serve a play with direct and faithful repre-
sentations of character. This means, ideally, that the
audience is not concerned with the actors as individ-
uals, but as agents who manifest character. The actor's
job is to step inside a play, as it were, and take on a
new identity--that being the character he is portraying.
This is essentially how Stanislavsky viewed acting, his
primary concern being how the actor can most effective-
ly enter into the character he is to play.
34 BARBARA E. THORNBURY

Can the task of Kabuki actor be looked at in the

same way? Is the audience's interest in Kabuki limited
only to certain character interrelations within a play?
The answer appears to be no.
The Kabuki actor has a multiplicity of roles, both
inside and outside the conventional limits of a play.
Thus, the "meaningful dramatic context" must even
extend beyond any written script. And indeed, it is
often said that Kabuki scripts are not meant to be
read. (One is reminded that the first publication of
plays came as late as the Meiji era, playwrighting
having started some two centuries earlier.6)
Here we find an important feature of Kabuki.
Whereas we think of many--if not most--plays in the
Western tradition as having both a theatrical and a
purely literary appeal (meaning that we see them as
works to be produced in the theatre as well as to be
read in the library), Kabuki is more of a theatrical
art exclusively. Even within the Japanese tradition
itself, many more people read No plays than attend
performances of them. Although reading Kabuki is not
without value, the basic script is incomplete especial-
ly in the sense that it cannot reveal all of the
special multiple interrelationships between actor,
role, and character, which are so central to the art
of Kabuki.
It is these multiple interrelationships and some
of their implications that I wish to discuss in the
remainder of this paper. In order to give concrete
examples I will focus mainly on Sukeroku Yukari no
Edo Zakura, commonly called Sukeroku, one of the most
popular plays of the repertoire.
The Kabuki actor works simultaneously on three
different levels. These are: 1) the actor as yakusha,
2) the yakusha as yakugara, and 3) the yakugara as
yaku.
Since yakusha is usually translated into English
as "actor," it may seem redundant to call the first
level "the actor as yakusha." In point of fact, how-
ever, the word yakusha as it is applied to Kabuki,
 KABUKI 35

implies a great deal more than just individuals who

happened to find themselves on the stage. In a 1962
production of Sukeroku,7 Sukeroku was played by Ichi-
kawa Danjuro, Agemaki by Nakamura Utaemon, and Ikyu
by Bando Mitsugoro. Danjuro, Utaemon, and Mitsugoro
are all, of course, historical stage names, indicating
that the actors who were accorded these names had after
many years of training and practice attained a certain
level of skill and esteem in the Kabuki world. Recog-
nition of the individual actor takes the form of a
number along with the name (e.g. Juichidaime Ichikawa
Danjuro--"Ichikawa Danjuro XI"), but what really is at
issue is the symbolic value of names like Danjuro and
Utaemon.
Individuals may die, but the spirit of the great
stage names continues. When audiences come to see
these actors perform they already have certain expecta-
tions in their minds--expectations apart from any play
per se. This is important because in a very real sense
Danjuro, for example, already has a dramatic function
before one even considers Sukeroku or any other parti-
cular part he may be playing. This point is best
illustrated in a discussion of the second level,
yakusha as yakugara.
Yakugara may be translated"role" or "role type."
The Danjuro line of actors, for instance, is known for
their portrayal of the tachiyaku, the great male hero
roles, consummate source of the aragoto style of Edo
Kabuki. Utaemon, on the other hand, is an onnagata, a
player of women's roles. There are many sub-divisions
of role types within the more general categories.
Danjuro as Sukeroku is a kind of otokodate, or "chival-
rous commoner." Utaemon as Agemaki is a tayu, a high-
ranking courtesan. Mitsugoro as Ikyu is a jitsu aku,
a bad guy. This kind of role type categorization can
be done for all the actors who appear in Sukeroku, or
any other Kabuki play.
There are few examples in world theatre where role
types are so central to the dramatic art and developed
with such complexity as they are in Kabuki. The best
example that comes to mind is the commedia dell' arte
36 BARBARA E. THORNBURY

which flourished in Europe from about the middle of the

sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries.
Like Kabuki the commedia dell' arte had well-developed
role types, but that is as far as its development
reached. When commedia dell' arte actors performing
roles such as the phlegmatic doctor, the wily lawyer,
the harsh father, the beautiful daughter, the handsome
suitor, and the evil rival met on stage, many dramatic
situations could and did arise. But in order for a
theatrical tradition to grow--and thus survive--inter-
esting and well-conceived dramatic characters derived
from a substantial repertoire of plays is prerequisite.
The Kabuki had the plays and survived, the commedia
dell' arte did not and died.
Even before character is considered, it should be
said that although particular actors may be identified
primarily with certain yakugara, the art of Kabuki
gains much from the skillful versatility of its major
actors. It is fascinating to see actors with the
ability to move between and among role types and in
certain instances be able to instantly transform them-
selves on stage from one role type to another, depend-
ing on the particular characters the actor is playing.
This, then, brings us to the third level on which the
actor works: the yakugara as yaku.
Yaku are the particular characters in a play and
it is at this level that the concept of multiplicity
in the interrelationship between actor, role, and
character is fully developed.8 Although instances of
actors playing more than one character in a play can
be found in the European tradition, for example--as
in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Yeats' The
Words upon the Window Pane, and Genet's The Balcony--
in European drama there is generally a one actor to
one character relationship in the course of a play.
This is not the case in Kabuki. On the contrary, one
Kabuki actor may play several characters--and roles--
in the same play and often with very interesting results.
There are two techniques by which an actor can
enter a multiplicity of role and character interre-
lationships in a play. One is to play a single
 KABUKI 37

character and also that character in disguise. The

other is for the actor to double his parts by playing
different characters--characters with no necessary
relationship to each other except that they all appear
within the framework of the same play. These two
techniques are, in short, disguising and doubling.
Sukeroku provides what is perhaps the archetypal
example of disguising in Kabuki. In the production that
has been referred to Danjuro plays the warrior hero
Soga Goro who has disguised himself as a commoner named
Sukeroku. What is most curious is that Soga Goro lived
in the twelfth century. By being Sukeroku, he is then
catapulted by a special kind of theatrical time machine
into the eighteenth century.9 Historically, it is
illogical, but theatrically it is acceptable--and workable
for generations of Kabuki audiences.
Time is not the only element that is theatricalized
for the purpose of a disguise. At the beginning of the
play, Sukeroku's mother, Manko, disguised as a samurai,
has set out to find her son. The actor portraying Manko
is an onnagata, a male actor who plays women's roles. In
order to carry out Mank5's samurai disguise he must play
a woman in the role of a man. Thus, in effect, the actor
is at a double remove from reality. It is only the
theatre where the process of time can be bent to man's
will and where a woman who is not a woman can pretend that
she is a man.
Other instances of disguising can be found in
Sukeroku and throughout the whole repertoire as well.
Hanako as Kiyohime in Musume DPj5ji and Benten Kozo in his
numerous disguises--including a woman's role--in Benten
Kozo are noteworthy examples. Although disguises exhibit
varying degrees of complexity, in order for the technique
of disguising to be effective the same actor must play all
parts of the disguise. It will not work if Sukeroku and
Soga Goro, for example, are played by different actors.
This is not true, however, in the case of doubling.
In doubling different actors may play the different
characters, but with different effect than if played by
the same actor. The reason for this is that doubling,
unlike disguising, is not built into the dramatic
38 BARBARA E. TIHORNBURY

structure of a play. It is, rather, a kind of

director's decision.
In the Kabuki version of Funa Benkei the beau-
tiful Shizuka Gozen and the monstrous Tomomori are
traditionally played by the same actor. Doubling is
not only pleasing as a display of the actor's versa-
tility in role playing, but it can also create or
clarify new--and often ironic--character interrelations
for the audience. While Shizuka and Tomomori have no
particular relationship to each other, they are both
related in an almost opposite way to Yoshitsune. One
is Yoshitsune's lover; the other is the incarnation of
his mortal enemy. When the two characters are played
by the same actor, a transformation of lover-into-enemy
is necessitated. Although the role of lover is dis-
tinct from the role of enemy at least in Funa Benkei,
in the world of men the line that separates "lover"
and "enemy" may be thin indeed and it is this kind of
fluid contrast that the actor achieves through the
technique of doubling. Again, the same results would
not be possible if the parts were played by different
actors.
There are a number of variations of disguising
and doubling. Although a more complete discussion of
them must be reserved for a future study, there are
two examples I would like to mention now. One is the
"Chushingura" type of disguise, so named because as in
the play Chushingura the disguise includes all the
characters and incidents in the play and is never
revealed except in the mind of the audience. The other
is that most theatrical of all disguises and doublings:
the moment when the actor reverses the artistic process
and suddenly steps out of character to take the role
of a "plain" actor. He may pause to sip tea, chat with
the audience, congratulate or 3ympathize with a fellow
actor. In this way, he reminds everyone that the art
of the theatre is from the start a very elaborate
disguise.
Kabuki, as dramatic art, gives expression to the
complexities of human nature and society. The artistic
process is based on the actor, who functions through
 KABUKI 39

a multiplicity of role and character interrelationships

in a play. As I have tried to show, these interre-
lationships are analyzable on three levels: yakusha,
yakugara, and yaku.
In sum, Kabuki begins with the yakusha, the great
Danjuro, Utaemon, and others, whose artistic heritage
gives them immediate and significant dramatic stature.
The activity of the yakusha is based on generalized
yakugara (the tachiyaku and tayu, for example) and
finds final expression in specific yaku (Sukeroku and
Manko, for example). These interrelationships are
multiplied by disguising and doubling, techniques which
are highly theatrical and enhance the enjoyment and
meaning of a play.

Having followed this approach, we can conclude

that the dramatic complexity of Kabuki stems in large
part from the actor in his richly varied dimensions of
role and character. It is a complexity that cannot be
entirely appreciated by reading only the script of a
play. Moreover, it is a complexity that adequately
fulfills the critic's search for artistic significance,
or in other words, meaningful dramatic context in
Kabuki.

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

NOTES:
*This article is a revised version of a paper read
at the ATJ meeting (literature panel) held in Washington,
D.C., November 28, 1975.
1.Sergei Eisenstein, "The Unexpected," in E.T.
Kirby, ed., Total Theatre: A Critical Anthology (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1969), p. 178.
2. Kawatake Toshio, A History of Japanese Theater
II, Bunraku and Kabuki (Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, 1971),
p. 63.
3. George Santayana, from The Sense of Beauty,
quoted in Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New
York: Atheneum, 1964), p. 62.
40 BARBARA E. THORNBURY

4. J.L. Styan, The Elements of Drama (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 174-5.
5. Bentley, p. 67.

6. Gunji Masakatsu, Kabuki, trans. by John Bester

(Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1969), p. 33. Al-
though the publication of joruri plays began in the
early seventeenth century, the first Kabuki play to
appear in print was Kawatake Mokuami's Kanzen choaku
nozoki garakuri (1891). E-iri kyogenbon, summaries of
Kabuki plays in pamphlet form, date from the late seven-
teenth century. See also Ted Takaya, An Inquiry into
the Role of the Traditional Kabuki Playwright (Columbia
Univ., unpub. diss., 1969), pp. 19 and 152ff.
7. Entire performance, with accompanying script
and descriptive notes, Victor Records, SJ-3001-3.
8. Role is a broader and more abstract concept
than character. As can be seen from examples already
given, roles are labeled in generalized terms: the hero,
the chivalrous commoner, the courtesan, etc. Charac-
ters, on the other hand, are usually given proper names:
Sukeroku, Agemaki, and so on.
9. See the section "Gikyoku no hasso" in Gunji
Masakatsu, Kabuki no hasso (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1959), pp.
68-80, for a discussion in Japanese terms of matters
related to disguising and doubling.