“The greatest heights in drama are always between two playres” (Laurence Olivier)―or between a player and chorus. One of the best dialogic plays, Racine's Phèdre has 30 scenes, of which most are of dialogues between a hero (heroine) and his (her) confident (e). V. iv of the play, however, contains a long narrative (le récit de Thèramène, 73 lines). The Japanese theatres (Noh, Kanuki, Bunraku) have the tradition of “katari” (narrative, or recitation) with some kinds of music and dancing. Compared with French classical plays and modern realistic plays, the romantic plays, Shakespeare and Kabuki have a quality of “katari.” “Katari” is something more than a mere narration; it is very persuasive, or “performative” (in the sense of J. L. Austin). Shakespeare's soliloquy is typical of “katari.” The difference between the Shakespearean soliloquy and the modern monologue cannot be stressed too much. (Compare the former with the “monologue” in O'Neill's Strange Interlude.)

A human being has a feeling or an emotion when he or she is put in certain circumstances and decides what to do, judging the value of his or her responding physical actions. But what is the relation between the inner feeling and the outer action in the fictitious character of a play when an actor actualizes it on the stage? An actor cannot have a real feeling or emotion on the stage and yet paradoxically has to act in the given circumstances as if he were really having a feeling. Stanislavski describes this relationship in his Creating a Role. He says that if an actor analyzes and shows exact physical actions of the character in the cirsumstances indicated in the play, examining the lines of the character, a real feeling emerges in himself. Stanislavski is reversing the process from feeling to action in real life, and if the emergence of a feeling is not always assured for an actor, the audience will assume from the exact imitation of physical actions that the character is having a real feeling, and can have an empathy with the character. This theory reminds us of the famous paradox of acting that Diderot advocated more than 100 years before Stanislavski.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the essential structure of rhythm in the process of a performance from the view point of homeodyamics, which produces the living state of organism: an unexplored field of performance analysis. Rhythm consists of two contradicting and yet cooperatative actions: to drive and to restrain. According to Nakai Shoichi, a scholar of aesthetics, to see a performance is to recognize something substantial of the world beyond ordinary life. This is possible because the dynamics of rhythm a spectator experiences during the performance reveals the essential aspect of the real world. For the analysis of dramatic rhythm, Yamazaki Masakazu's The Acting Mind and some of Kinoshita Junji's comments on houseback riding are quite suggestive. In the concluding part of the paper, this writer examines the dramatic rhythm in the scene between Oedipus and Teiresias in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.

In the section 14 of Sarugaku dangi, one of his treatises on Noh, Zeami writes as a footnote, “Kasama no noh is not appropriate nowadays.” We may assume that this is a play called Yasu-inu, which has been excluded from the actual repertories of Noh plays. There are two questions to be answered. (1) The question whether this play was written in Zeami's days or had been done before. In other words, whether Zeami criticized a contemporary play or was against reviving the old play. (2) The question why Zeami regarded this play inappropriate at the time. The play deals with Yasu-inu, the son of a military man who revolted against the Kamakura-fu, the administrative office in Kamakura in the begining of the Muromachi Period. Kasama, the waki of the play, comes to arrest him and a fighting ensues.

In the process of finding answers to these questions one also will find what the situation of the noh actors under the patronage of Shogun was; Zeami was definitely one of them. Moreover, by examining this play, one can detect important influences of other noh plays on it, and vice versa.

The main theme of Aotozoshi hana no nishikie（青砥稿花紅彩画），usually called Benten-kozo or Shiranami gonin otoko, by Mokuami is the strange and unhappy life of Benten-kozo, a changeling, who committed suicide when a young man. The so far hidden story of Benten-kozo comes to be known in the scene of “Hamamatsu-ya oku-zashiki”, which therefore should be regarded as occupying the central position of the whole play. However, this scene of “oku-zashiki” follows that of “Hamamatsu-ya mise-saki”, and is rarely put on stage, though the latter is one of the most frequently performed scenes of kabuki today. The reason for this seems to be the fact that “oku-zashiki” is a sort of dark and sorrowful scene in opposition to the preceding “mise-saki”, a bright and cheerful scene, where Beneten-kozo in disguise of a young princess reveals himself and surprises not only the characters in the play but also the audience itself.

In this paper the play is analyzed from the viewpoint of the dramaturgy of pairing darkness and brightness and a new evaluation of the play is suggested.

Ichikawa Danjuro I is often talked about in the history of Kabuki or Japanese culture. Although we have quite a lot of historical materials about him, his life in the Genroku Kabuki world has not so far been entirely reconstructed, for the most important parts of his life are not clear. Therefore, to know the personality of Danjuro and his life in Kabuki world we have to interpret the extant historical materials in our own ways.

There are few materials about Danjuro's young days. Danjuro seems to have had a strong will to raise his status in the theatre world. But he was not so handsome as others in the company, who in general attracted the audience as sexual objects rather than as actors. This might explain a reason why Danjuro came to be known as an actor of kataki-yaku (the role of a bad man) first. Later he tried to reach a position of power as a za-moto (an owner of a theatre house), but in vain; there were only four licensed theares permitted in Edo (Tokyo). However, he established his fame as the highest tachi-yakusha (the role of hero), and formed the Ichkawa House of actors. His son succeeded his roles so that the Ichikawa House would be the most priviledged house of actors after his unfortunate death.

The word ‘buyo’, meaning dance, began to be used in the late 19th century in Japan. It is the combination of the words, ‘bu’ and ‘yo’. ‘Bu’ or ‘mai’ is a dance of circular and static movements and ‘yo’ or ‘odori’ a dance of jumping and dynamic movements. There is another element in Japanese dance, ‘furi’ or ‘furigoto’, that is, a dance of both aspects of ‘mai’ and ‘odori’ but also of imitative movements.

‘Furi’, or the verb form ‘furu’, means ‘quake’, ‘shake’ or ‘vibrate’, which originally implied the vital lives of gods present in physical things in nature. ‘Furi’ was closely related with shaman movements; a shaman imitates movements of a god he or she was possessed by.

‘Mai’ and ‘odori’ also suggest the relationship with shamanism; one may assume that two aspects of ‘furi’ was devided into ‘mai’ and ‘odori’. The present writer accordingly classifies and analyzes various aspects of kabuki buyo, especially ‘henge buyo’ (dance of transfiguration).

A man of religion, Shunkan, is a historical figure, who was exiled to Iwojima on a charge of conspiracy against the military rulers, the Heike. The story is related in the great epic about the vicissitude of the Heike family in the 12th century, The Tale of the Heike. Shunkan's story was dramatized as a noh play, Shunkan. This noh play was employed as the basic material for a scene in a ningyo-joruri (puppet theatre) play, Heike-nyogo-no-shima, written by Chikamatsu Monzaemon in 1719, which in turn was transformed into a kabuki play the following year. Kurata Momozo wrote his Shunkan in 1919, not after any of the preceding plays, but after the epic, The Tale of the Heike.

In short, the theme of the epic Shunkan is the powers of religion and political connections, while the noh play expresses a deep despair of a lonely man in exile. Chikamatsu's Shunkan is bound by the love of family, and the kabuki play presents a visually dramatic figure of the head of a family, Shunkan, as hero. Kurata's writing draws upon his own agoines as a modern man, particularly in relation to making of ego, betrayal, jealousy, etc. Yet, the narrative aspect remains in all these works, and the examination of changes of Shunkan through the ages may suggest a new dramaturgy for the future drama.

In this paper the present writer examines the situations and frequencies of talking shows in show houses, which were allowed to be built in the precinct of Tenmagu Shrine in Osaka, from the end of 18th century to the middle of 19th century. There must have been show houses in precincts of other shrines, but Osaka Tenmagu is almost the only shrine that has kept documents of those houses.

Through the examinations of the douments, we come to know that the genre of ‘rakugo’ was separately established from other talking shows after around the 1830s as ‘mukashi banashi’.

Hyryukidan seiyo kabuki (漂流奇譚西洋劇The Strange Story of the Castaways: A Play in the Western-style) was written by Mokuami, and produced in 1879 at the Shintomi-za theater in Tokyo, featuring Ichikawa Danjuro IX and other kabuki actors. It is the story of young Japanese men, who, while on a sea journey, are shipwrecked. Fortunately, they are rescued by an American ship and then travel on to America, England and France. While in Paris, they attend a performance of an operetta. The Western actors used in this original 1879 production happened to be on tour at the Gaiety Theatre in Yokohama at the time. The producer who employed them, Morita Kan'ya, was a great enthusiast of Western theatre.

In the history of the modern Japanese theatre, this production has been underestimated and badly neglected. Recently, however, the present writer found four esquisses for the stage pictures of this production by Kawanabe Kyosai and rough sketches for them by Mokuami, and, through the examination of the significances of these sketches, realized that this production was an epochmaking event in the history of modern kabuki, for it clearly attempted to create a new type of a Western styled (i. e. realistic) play. The failure seems to have been almost entirely due to the operetta performed by Western actors, which was totally incomprehensible and strange to the Japanese audience of the time.

The fact that in the history of Japanese literature the turn of the 19th century represented the age of naturalism is rarely remembered especially by scholars of modern theare. The purpose of this paper is to reveal new characteristics of naturalism in theatre which have not so far been realized, through the examination of “Edo” aspects in Shimamura Hogetsu, Hanabusa Ryugai and some important figures in Shinpa (New School) Theatre.

We will come to recognize the significance of the formation of the concept of theatre in modern Japan, and see another possible line of the development of the modern theatre in Japan rather than the line from Jiyu gekijo (Free Theatre) by Osanai Kaoru to Tsukiji Little Theatre, the legitimate Shingeki (New Drama).

Shigosen no Matsuri was written in 1977, 20 years after the author had found the material for the play in the story of Lord Taira no Tomomori in The Tale of the Heike (the great epic about the battle between the House of Heike and the House of Genji in the 13th century in Japan). One reason for the delay could be that Kinoshita had difficulty in creating in this play a passive hero, who could foresee the fateful fall of his house and accept it, and yet neither obeyed nor escaped from it. To create this hero, Kinoshita had to free himself from his almost fixed idea of the ‘positive hero’. The creation of this new type of hero was only possible by finding an appropriate role for Yamamoto Yasue, the actress who had been so important for his plays and his life, a fictitious role of Kagemi, a maiden of Izumo Great Shrine. Kagemi teaches Tomomori the harsh fact that Nature has no sentiment human beings can rely on: a realization which wings a kind of religious enlightenment. This might have something to do with the fact that Kinoshita is a Christian, though he says he abandoned his belief after he had been baptized in his youth.

There have been several influential controversies in classical studies since the beginning of the twentieth century, and assuredly one of them is the problem of the origin of Greek drama. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the problem of the origin of Roman drama as contrasted with that of Greek drama.

It is a well-known fact that Jane Ellen Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion published in 1903 caused much controversy. She maintained that the origin of Greek drama consisted in the Dionysiac ritual, and Gilbert Murray and F. M. Conrnford supported her theory. The theory of these scholars called the Cambridge Ritualists was refuted thoroughly by Sir Arthur Pichard-Cambridge and has been considered untrustworthy in classical studies, whereas it is still exercising a great influence on theater research.

In contrast, the origin of Roman drama has rarely been discussed. The materials which tell the origin are restricted. The most important one is found in Livy's History, in which several primitive dramatic performances are described, but none of these performances seems to have underlain the Roman drama. Roman drama did not evolve undergoing various stages, but it just began in 240 B. C. when the Greek dramas were translated into Latin and performed.

Some philosophers conceive today that the present popularity of the media of virtual reality is connected with the collapse of the judgement of value at a deep level. A similar complex phenomenon was found at the dawn of the Modern Age. The theatre, which invented the technique of perspective scenery, functioned in a sense as a sort of VR medium. We can verify this fact in the case of P. Corneille's L'Illusion comique (1635-6), which has a very specific structure of the double “theatre within theatre”.

In those days Skepticism prevailed among European intellectuals. For them the world ―the medieval cosmos― seemed to be transformed into a kind of simulacrum of theatre, not vice versa. L'Illusion comique represents this transformation by means of the double structures of theatre within theatre, i. e. virtual reality. Therefore, it can be undertood to be a formative apparatus of the modern world, as J.-M. Apostolides says.

Late in February 1863 a play called Switzerland in Japan was performed on a temporary open-air stage in the city Schwyz in Switzerland, which happened to be the first instance of the traditional performances called “the Play of the Japanese” (die Japanesenspiele). It was a kind of Fastnachtspiel (carnival play) and was not necessarily meant to be a friendly sign to Japan but, rather, a criticism to the then ongoing attempt to establish the treaty between Switzerland and the Japanese Edo Government. But it started the tradition of “the Play of the Japanese”. Its basic structure consists of the following facts: (1) the town of Schwyz is called Yeddo (Edo), (2) people of Schwyz are called Japanese, (3) on the temporary stage a play by the court poet of Japan is performed in front of the Japanese Emperor and Emperess. This paper is the result of the investigation on the tradition of this unique play.

In spite of the fact that Dostoevsky wrote no play in his life, his novels greatly influenced the modern dramatic literature.

This paper focuses especially on the influences of Dostoevsky on Chekhov's psychological short stories and late plays. We come to see dualism and profound insights in life and nature as most significant similarities between both writers.

The Brazilian theatre activist Augusto Boal developed a new system of theatre called “Theatre of the Oppressed”, in which the actor-spectator structure of theatre is annulled and the participants become spect-actors (active spectator) who must act out their ideas of persoanl and social change. Because of its practical nature, the work of Boal has influenced not only those in the field of theatre but also educators, political activists and social workers.

Howerver, after he moved from Latin America to North America and Europe, Boal seems to have focused more on therapeutic themes than political ones, that is to say, he shifted his interests from the social to the persoanl. Does this suggest an essential change in his theatrical philosophy?

The aim of this paper is to show by examining his activities from the earliest stage to the present that Boal's theatrical philosophy remains constant in spite of changes in techniques. His method continues to be open to social activities.