An Analysis of Kara Juro's John Silver

Abstract

The present paper attempts to elaborate Kara's notion of the body or the physicality by means of analysing John Silver, a drama first staged in 1967.

Around the same time Kara published one of his representative essays, The Privileged Entities (Tokkenteki Nikutairon), whose influence upon the young theatrical troupes at the time was immense. There Kara stressed the privileged entity of the actor or even of the stage itself.

Although it seems his dramatic imagination on physicality was significantly described in it, it's still too ambiguous to be accurately understood. Therefore this paper will analyse his play, John Silver, in order to grasp clearly the idea of physicality Kara embraced.

John Silver is a drama with the theme of the search for the messiah, John Silver, who never appears: an apparent reflexion of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which was very influential among the dramatists in the 1960's, especially in their dramatic structures involving the wait for someone or something that would never arrive. But in John Silver, some peculiar characters with physical defects act for Silver. Moreover, an artificial leg of Silver plays an essential part in the drama. These aspects should be seen as keys to interpret the notion of the physicality Kara proposed.