Date: 16 June – 4 July 2009, 7.45pm
Venue: Oval House Theatre, 52-54 Kennington Oval, London SE11 5SW
Tel: 020 86946472
Email: info@stonecrabs.co.uk
Web: www.stonecrabs.co.uk / www.ovalhouse.com

Never before staged in the United Kingdom in English, Yukio Mishima’s lyrically imaginative modern adaptations of classical Noh drama and Kabuki merge traditional forms of Japanese theatre with 21st century psychology. Past and present, reality and illusion, life and death, love, greed, anger collide in a world where characters are forced to find the poetic within the mundane and love in the most unlikely places. 

A Yukio Mishima double bill:
The turbulent life of Yukio Mishima, one of the greatest exponents of Japanese literature, led him to commit harakiri at the age of forty-five. The haunting beauty of his modern classics, Hanjo and Hell Screen, promise an evening of pure and unforgettable delight at the theatre.

In this bittersweet story of unrequited love, the beautiful Hanako waits at a train station with an opened fan in her arms, peering into the face of every man who alights, only to return each time disappointed to her waiting-room bench…

Yoshihide is commissioned to paint Hell, he sets about having his sadistic vision recreated before him so that he may paint it with measured strokes… Revealed in a cup of sake with a crimson maple leaf floating on it, his conceit comes with a hellish twist – causing a beautiful maiden to be roasted alive in the inferno of a falling carriage. Such is the price of true art.