By arts editor Helen Musa

It’s springtime so it must be time for the ANU’s Kabuki club, Za Kabuki, to hit the stage at Canberra Rep Theatre.

Known as the oldest Kabuki troupe in the Southern Hemisphere and founded in 1976 by teachers in the ANU Japan Centre, including present-day director Shun Ikeda, they like to mix traditional Japanese scripts with modern jokes, pop music, dancing and local Australian cultural elements, and to flout traditional Japanese Kabuki rules by having women play male roles alongside men.

This year’s choice is one of the company’s favourites, The Sardine Seller’s Net of Love (Iwashi Uri Koi Hikiami) by novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima, known not just for his brilliant literary output but for his right-wing views, which culminated in his ritual suicide in 1970.

Curiously, his traditionalist views led him to write several ‘new Kabuki’ plays in the classical idiom, distinguishing them from his modern psychological Noh plays, three of which I have directed in the past.

When I pop in on a technical rehearsal earlier this week, I find club president and producer, Chiyo Brown, busy herding actors into the dressing rooms to put on their striking ‘kumadori’ makeup, while supervising the painting of props and the construction of a huge platform from milk crates pinched from all over the campus.

Brown, a third year Asian studies and law student, tells me that this is different from some of the more dramatic, tragic and dark plays usually selected, being for the most part “dry and comedic”.

Briefly, Sarugenji, a humble sardine seller, falls madly in love with Hotarubi, the most glamorous and unattainable courtesan in a Kyoto pleasure-house, so to win her, disguises himself as a wealthy samurai.

Spoiler alert: Hotarubi turns out to be a kidnapped princess, so the whole play is much like a romcom, very familiar to modern audiences.

There’s lots of accessible comedy too. Because the protagonist is a sardine seller, he gives all the characters names of fish like ‘red snapper’ or ‘octopus’, drawing on his expertise.

As always, Brown tells me, they’ll rely on the costumes to bring colour and life to the staging, with five courtesans wearing five different colours to match their names, and the action will be underpinned not by live music but by atmospheric recorded music by Lucas Ferreira.

Brown says she expects audiences to find it entertaining to watch a play in a different style, with the actors in different makeup, different walking styles and different ways of talking. As well, the story is such that the audience will readily predict where it is going, and it’s no secret that there’ll be a happy ending in spite of small twists.

One of Za Kabuki’s proud boasts is that it has male characters being played by females, even though on the professional Kabuki stage, Shakespeare-style, men play women and some of the most famous actors are expert female impersonators or ‘onnagata’.

But Marion Halas, a final year science student who also studied for a diploma in Japanese, will be doing the very opposite as she plays the plum role of the sardine seller, Sarugenji.

Her plan, she tells me as she applies the thick white base makeup, Oshiroi, is to stay acting in Kabuki after she graduates.

“I had no background in acting, but my Japanese tutor was president of Za Kabuki and I thought it would be fun,” she says. “I like acting in Japanese better than in English, I can lay it on thick.”

Besides, she particularly enjoys moments when the audience gets the jokes, showing that they’re engaged.

As for her role, she’s played main characters in the past so has practised traditional masculine body movements, but Sarugenji is not all that manly, so she has to show that he is male but has softer elements, quite a challenge.

“But now I am getting it,” Halas reports.

Za Kabuki’s The Sardine Seller’s Net of Love, Canberra Rep Theatre, Acton, October 9-11.

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