以日本元素演绎莎士比亚的大师永别舞台

Yukio Ninagawa, 80, Who Directed Avant-Garde Productions of Classics, Dies
以日本元素演绎莎士比亚的大师永别舞台

Yukio Ninagawa, a Japanese theater director who fused elaborate Kabuki with Western realism to mount original, critically acclaimed productions of classic Greek and Shakespearean plays in Europe and the United States as well as in his own country, died on May 12 in Tokyo. He was 80.

日本舞台剧导演蜷川幸雄把精致的日本歌舞伎表演同西方现实主义风格结合起来，将古希腊戏剧与莎士比亚戏剧搬上欧美与日本舞台，其独创的风格备受评论界好评。他于5月12日在东京逝世，享年80岁。

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said the Ninagawa Studio, which he founded as a theater group and school.

他所创立的剧团兼学校蜷川工作室宣布，死因是肺炎引起的并发症。

A failed painter and frustrated actor initially plagued by self-doubt, Mr. Ninagawa turned to directing when he was 30. He survived a stabbing in 1972 by a leftist who considered his motifs too frivolous, and committed himself to presenting avant-garde versions of timeless tragedies that resonated with current events.

蜷川先生曾是失败的画家与受挫的演员，内心充满自我怀疑，30岁才转行做导演。他一直致力于以先锋形式呈现能与现代生活产生共鸣的不朽古典悲剧，然而1972年，他曾遭到左翼分子行刺，此人认为他的戏剧主题过于轻浮。

“If there are a thousand young men in the auditorium, I should expect a thousand knives,” he wrote in 1993 in a memoir, “A Thousand Knives, a Thousand Eyes,” a reference to the stabbing. “I thought I had to produce performances for those thousand knives.” (One of his early renderings of “Macbeth” was accompanied onstage by the sound of exploding tear gas grenades being lobbed by the police against demonstrators.)

“如果剧院里有一千个年轻男子，我就得当心一千把刀子，”1993年，他在回忆录《千刃千眼》(A Thousand Knives, a Thousand Eyes)中写道，这个书名也是来自那次遇刺事件。“我觉得自己制作戏剧，就是为了那一千把刀子。”（他早年制作的《麦克白》会在舞台上播放警察驱散示威者时投掷的催泪瓦斯发出的爆炸声）。

Outside Japan, Mr. Ninagawa collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Edinburgh Festival, the New York Shakespeare Festival and, as recently as last year, the Lincoln Center Festival.

在日本以外，蜷川先生曾与皇家莎士比亚剧团(Royal Shakespeare Company)、爱丁堡国际艺术节(Edinburgh Festival)与纽约莎士比亚艺术节合作，去年他还曾与林肯中心艺术节合作。

Critics were often reverential. Writing about the Ninagawa Company’s production of “The Tempest” in London in 1989, Michael Billington, the theater critic of The Guardian, proclaimed in The New York Times that the director generated “moments of pure magic” in a thrilling dramatization that demonstrated how Shakespeare’s play “not only can be accommodated to Oriental styles but also can become a complex meditation on the nature of theater itself.”

评论家们通常对他毕恭毕敬。1989年，蜷川剧团在伦敦上演《暴风雨》(The Tempest)之际，《卫报》的剧评人迈克尔·比灵顿(Michael Billington)在《纽约时报》上宣布，这位导演创造了“纯粹的魔法时刻”，对莎士比亚戏剧进行了激动人心的改编，表明它“不仅可以适应东方风格，亦可以成为对戏剧本质的深思”。

Referring to the 15th-century Japanese style of musical drama, Mr. Billington wrote, “The Ninagawa Company proved that there is no business like Noh business.”

比灵顿写道，“蜷川剧团的作品证明，能乐的确独一无二。”能乐是日本15世纪的一种音乐剧。

In fusing two cultures, Mr. Ninagawa injected modern music, Buddhist imagery, indigenous Japanese flora and teeming spectacles into classic plays. Yet he remained faithful to the text, the scholar Kawai Shoichiro wrote in “The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare” (2008), an authoritative collection of essays edited by John Russell Brown.

蜷川先生把两种文化结合起来，为古典戏剧引入了现代音乐、佛教意象、日本本土植物以及各种壮观的场面。但是，学者河合祥一郎在由约翰·罗素·布朗 (John Russell Brown)编纂的文集《罗德里奇伴侣系列：导演们的莎士比亚》(The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare)一书中撰文指出，蜷川先生同样忠于原著台词。

“Throughout his career, his aim was not to reinterpret or to adapt Shakespeare’s play but to bring it in close rapport with the modern world and make it easier for his audiences — mainly Japanese — to understand, by means of visualization and Japanization,” Professor Shoichiro wrote.

“在整个职业生涯里，他的目标从不是重新阐释或改编莎士比亚戏剧，而是通过视觉化与日本化的手法，令它融入现代世界，令观众（主要是日本人）更容易理解，”河合教授写道。

Mr. Ninagawa was born in Kawaguchi, a city in the greater Tokyo area, on Oct. 15, 1935. His father was a tailor. His mother often took him to the theater. He is survived by his wife, Hiroko, and his daughters, Mika and Mami.

蜷川先生于1935年10月15日出生于大东京区的川口市。父亲是裁缝，母亲经常带他去戏院看戏。他在世的亲人包括妻子真山知子、女儿蜷川实花与蜷川麻美。

Mr. Ninagawa had hoped to become an artist in high school but failed the entrance exam for the Tokyo University of the Arts.

蜷川先生在上高中时本想成为艺术家，却没能通过东京艺术大学的入学考试。

When he was 20, he joined the Seihai theater company as a trainee actor. But when he left to start his own experimental companies and to act on television and in films, he found himself handicapped without a full-time director and wondered whether his own talent might lie more in directing.

20岁那年，他加入青俳剧团，成了实习演员。但后来他离开那里，开创自己的实验剧团并在电视剧与电影中演出时，他觉得自己缺少一个全职导演，并且认为自己可能在导演方面更有才能。

“To jolt himself out of self-doubt and inertia, Ninagawa wrote ‘Ninagawa Tensai’ (‘Ninagawa Genius’) on a nameplate and hung it on his apartment door,” the English-language edition of the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun reported recently. “His reasoning was that if he proclaimed himself a genius, he would have to get cracking to prove he was the real deal. So he watched films and read books like a fiend and taught himself the art of stage directing.”

“为了让自己不至陷入自我怀疑与惰性，”蜷川先生在寓所外的名牌上写上了“蜷川天才”的字样，日本报纸《朝日新闻》英文版近期报道。“他的理由是，如果宣布自己是天才，就不得不着手努力证明自己的确是真正的天才。于是他疯狂地看电影、读书，自学舞台剧导演艺术。”

He made his directorial debut in 1969, directed Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in Japan for the first time in 1974 (accompanied by an Elton John rock score) and took his first production abroad — Euripides’ “Medea” — in 1983. That was followed by a production of “Macbeth,” which he took to the Edinburgh Festival in 1985 and to Central Park in the summer of 1986 as part of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. He also staged a highly stylized all-male version of “Medea” in the park that summer.

1969年，他执导的首部话剧——莎士比亚的《罗密欧与朱丽叶》(Romeo and Juliet)在日本首演，配乐包括埃尔顿·约翰(Elton John)的摇滚歌曲；1983年，他又首次携自己制作的欧里庇得斯(Euripides)悲剧《美狄亚》(Medea)来到海外。1985年他携《麦克白》在爱丁堡国际艺术节上演，并于1986年夏参加约瑟夫·帕普(Joseph Papp)创建的纽约莎士比亚节，在中央公园上演该剧。同年夏天，他还在中央公园上演了极为艺术化的纯男性版《美狄亚》。

For his productions of “Macbeth” and “Medea” at the National Theater in London, Mr. Ninagawa was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent of the Tony, in 1987. (Declan Donnellan won for “The Cid,” “Twelfth Night” and “Macbeth” at the Donmar Warehouse.)

1987年，他制作的《麦克白》与《美狄亚》在伦敦国家剧院上演，他也因此获得劳伦斯·奥利维尔奖(Laurence Olivier Award)提名，该奖项相当于美国的托尼奖(Tony)。当年获奖的是迪克兰·唐伦纳(Declan Donnellan)，他凭借在多玛尔仓库剧场(Donmar Warehouse)上演的《熙德》(The Cid)、《第十二夜》(Twelfth Night)和《麦克白》取胜。

Those performances were in Japanese, some with simultaneous English subtitles but others with no translations at all. Mr. Ninagawa said in the production notes to “Medea” that his goal was “to create a universal theater beyond the limits of age, nationality, language, customs and habits.”

蜷川先生制作的舞台剧都是以日语出演，有时配有同步的英文字幕，有的根本就没有翻译。他在《美狄亚》的制作手记中写道，自己的目的是“创造一种普遍的戏剧，它能超越年龄、国籍、语言、风俗与习惯”。

He took his production of “Macbeth” to the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1990. Bruce Weber wrote in The Times that while it was “the quickest three hours of Shakespeare you’ll ever see,” this version of “Macbeth,” with its overblown effects and gimmicks, “may have you thinking less about ambition, bloodshed, remorse and retribution than about Hollywood, MTV and the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.”

1990年，他携《麦克白》来纽约的布鲁克林音乐学院参加“下一波艺术节”(Next Wave Festival)。布鲁斯·韦伯(Bruce Weber)为时报撰文写道，这会是“你观看莎士比亚戏剧时感觉时间消逝最快的三个小时”，这个版本的《麦克白》充满各种华丽的效果和噱头，“会令你更多联想到好莱坞、MTV台和哈马赫尔·施莱默(Hammacher Schlemmer)产品目录，而不是野心、流血、懊悔与惩罚。”

Also about mirrors. Many were used in Mr. Ninagawa’s “Macbeth” as props to capture real and virtual images that recall the duality of everyday life as the plot of destruction and death unfolds.

此外还有镜子。蜷川先生在《麦克白》中使用了大量镜子作为道具，捕捉舞台上现实与虚拟的画面，随着毁灭与死亡情节的展开，令人联想起日常生活中的二重性。

“My perception of mortality is stronger than the last time I brought the play to New York,” Mr. Ninagawa told The Times in 2002. “I have come to understand that people learn about the world even by doing wrong. This is the mystery of human beings. Over time, I realize we must accept the bad with the good.”

“自从上次在纽约上演这个剧之后，我对生命的脆弱有了更强烈的认识，”2002年，蜷川先生在接受时报采访时说。“我开始理解，人们即便是通过做错事，也可以去了解这个世界。这是人类神秘的一面。随着时间过去，我发现我们必须同时接受事物好的一面与坏的一面。”

He added: “Growing old means that you physically become weak and your receptivity to new things may become weak, too. But there are new things in everyday life, and I always question whether I am picking up on them. If I realize that I cannot do that anymore, I have to quit.”

他补充说：“变老意味着你的身体变得虚弱，你对新事物的接受能力也可能变弱。但是日常生活中充满了新事物，我总在扪心自问，我是否跟上了它们。如果我发现自己再也跟不上新事物，我就会退休。”