The purpose of this paper is to examine how Fukuda Tsuneari (1912-1994), a Japanese critic, tried to achieve his vision of catharsis through his play Akechi Mitsuhide (1957), an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Fukuda translated and directed most of Shakespeare's plays, and adapted some of them. It is curiously enough that Akechi Mitsuhide was staged before Macbeth by his translation.

For him, Macbeth was an ideal hero to regain catharsis, which he thought was lost in the modern times. He came to think narrative possibility of history could be a formula to restore a tragedy, as Shakespeare did. Setting in the Age of Provincial Wars, he transposed Macbeth into a Japanese historical play.

In conclusion, what he wanted to represent was not Macbeth itself but a historical play and tragic catharsis with it. In other words, he had to confirm it before staging Shakespeare.

Kaoru Osanai, a pioneer of shingeki (new drama), was invited as a state guest to Moscow between November and December 1927 to participate in the celebrations to mark the Tenth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution. At his departure he announced that he would study the works of Vsevolod Meyerhold in particular. Osanai witnessed the Russian post-Revolutionary theatre in Moscow and came home. Previous opinions state that about the works of Meyerhold he made only a few notes in his “Extracted Russian Diary” and never said anything more on the subject.

However, soon after returning to Japan on February 18, 1928, he conducted a lecture titled “Literature Lecture: New Russian Theatre and our Kabuki Theatre” on the radio program of JOAK (the antecedent of NHK). Announcements appeared in several newspapers at that time. Because there are no previous studies that have ever mentioned this radio lecture, and moreover, it is said that Osanai must have witnessed no influence of kabuki theatre on the plays of Meyerhold while staying in Moscow, I introduce the new material. The Yomiuri Newspaper article reprinted in this paper is the most detailed of several announcements in newspapers at that time.

There are three different aspects of theater to be taken into consideration: (i) the place for theatrical performance; (ii) the theatre architecture, where the theatrical play is performed; and (iii) the venue for the theatrical performance, regardless of whether it is originally meant for theatre. Aspect (i) requires a theoretical analysis of the place of theater, which naturally exists whenever the actor and the audience face each other. Aspect (ii) leads to the historical perspective to observe the development of the relationship between the dramaturgical structure of the play and the formal structure of the playhouse. Aspect (iii) manifests the present-day situation of the theatrical event at various venues.

At the core of my theory of theater stands the triangular relationship between audience, actor, and the dramatic character. The place of theater stands at the relational line between the audience and the actor and consists of two aspects of “field” and “space.” “Field” is the conceptual characteristic, which means that we see the things on the stage as they are, and “space” means that we see the things on the stage as something else.

As for the time aspect of the performance on the stage, I propose a similar conceptual pair of “hour” and “time.” “Hour” represents what is happening on the stage, which can be measured by the watch, and “time” represents the whole duration of the plot of the play. The changing relationship between these two conceptual pairs makes up the history of the theater architecture and the play to be performed there.

The public evaluation of the theatrical venue depends on the valuableness of the performance there. The heavily subsidized public theater is not necessarily highly evaluated. In this regard, we need to examine the particular state of the audience as a group, “za.”

After my lecture at the conference, the discussant, Professor Yasushi Nagata, argued that the validity of the concept of “field” might be in doubt today, based on the open space performance typically seen at Japanese folk festivals. Instead, he emphasized the socio-historical characteristic of the site-specificity of the performance venue. I thought he misunderstood my concept of “field,” which is not a real but abstract aspect of the stage. However, it occurred to me later on that I might have misunderstood his argument as well. Therefore, I have re-examined both his and my arguments and come to realize that the site-specific aspect of the theatrical venue should also be taken into theoretical consideration with regard to the place of theater.

Thus, I add the concept of “site” to the pair of “field” and “space,” but still hesitate to consider these three aspects to be on the same conceptual level. This is because, while “site” is on the level of reality, “field” and “space” are on the abstract level. Likewise, besides the pair of “hour” and “time,” I bring in the concept of “period,” which indicates the seasonal time at the performance. It definitely affects the audience's perception of the performance, although it is, again, not on the same level as “hour” and “time.”