A game of throne: Cultural bytes, digital bits
"Sandaime Richard, written by Hideki Noda and directed by Ong Keng Sen, is a bold encounter with works of William Shakespeare. It introduces Shakespeare (Doji Shigeyama) into the play as a character put on a trial for falsifying history of Richard the Third (Kazutaro Nakamura). Inspired by the War of the Roses, the fight of an ikebana clan is depicted. The story is also staged in the framework of a Zen paradigm. This results in texts which suggest the non-duality of things, a minimalist set design, and repetitive patterns of multimedia images.
Each performer plays different characters. It is presented on a bare
stage which is transformed into a series of digital images by Keisuke
Takahashi. This creates a sense of a cyberspace, complemented with
electronic music by Toru Yamanaka. The audience is thus put in a
trance-like state, while the characters seem to be modified, re-edited,
intertextualised and cross-referenced with the convenient use of editing
technology.
In this induced digital world, the characters from Shakespeare’s
texts are dressed in white surrealistic and futuristic costumes designed
by Yanaihara Mitsushi. They are like avatars reprogrammed to take on
changing identities or one that is faceless. In this flux, they
challenge history, traditions and assumptions. Multimedia images such as
the continuous feathers which endlessly fall on the characters and the
circular shapes that sustained the scenes remind one of the cyclic
existence of life."
