What Is Kabuki? Four Hundred Years of Spectacular Japanese Theatre

The origin is credited to Izumo no Okuni, a shrine attendant who performed dances and comic sketches on a dry riverbed in Kyoto around 1603, drawing large crowds. The form was imitated immediately, often by troupes of women who also worked as prostitutes, and in 1629 the Tokugawa government banned women from the stage on grounds of public morality. Troupes of adolescent boys replaced them, and were banned in turn in 1652 for the same reason. What survived was performance by adult men only, which forced the development of the onnagata, the male actor specialising in female roles, whose art is not impersonation but a stylised construction of femininity that is regarded within the tradition as more expressive of it than a woman would be. Actors were legally classed among the lowest social ranks and were simultaneously celebrities whose portraits were the best-selling subject of the woodblock print trade.

Several features are immediately visible and each has a name and a function:

• •The hanamichi, a raised walkway running from the stage through the audience to the back of the hall, used for entrances and exits and for scenes played among the spectators
• •The mie, a dramatic pose held motionless at a moment of climax, with the actor crossing one eye, at which point audience members shout the actor's hereditary stage name, a practice called kakegoe that is expected rather than rude
• •Kumadori, the bold painted face make-up, whose colours are a code: red lines for heroism and passion, blue or indigo for villainy and jealousy, brown for supernatural beings
• •Revolving stages, trapdoors and lifts, developed in Japan during the eighteenth century, roughly a century before European theatres adopted equivalents
• •Kuroko, stage assistants dressed entirely in black who move props and adjust costumes in full view and are understood by convention to be invisible
• •Live musicians, with shamisen, drums and flute, and a narrator in some pieces, seated at the side or behind a screen

Plays fall into recognised categories. Jidaimono are historical pieces, usually set among the samurai class and frequently dealing with conflicts of duty and loyalty, of which the most performed is a dramatisation of the forty-seven ronin who avenged their lord and then killed themselves, based on a real incident of 1703. Sewamono are domestic plays about merchants, courtesans and ordinary townspeople, often involving love suicides, a genre so popular that the government at one point banned the plays because real double suicides were increasing. Shosagoto are dance pieces. A striking amount of the repertoire was adapted from bunraku, the puppet theatre, and the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, sometimes called the Japanese Shakespeare, wrote for both. Performances traditionally ran all day, with audiences eating, drinking and moving about, and modern programmes present selected acts rather than complete works, which is why a visitor may see the famous scene from four different plays in one afternoon.

The tradition is organised around hereditary lines. Actors belong to families that have performed for many generations, and a performer takes a stage name that has been held by his predecessors, moving up to more senior names during his career in ceremonies that are major events in themselves; the name Ichikawa Danjuro has been held by thirteen actors since the seventeenth century. Training begins in childhood, is conducted within the family, and is a matter of physical imitation rather than interpretation, since the aim is to reproduce a role as it has been handed down. Adoption is used freely to continue a line where there is no son. The system produces extraordinary technical continuity and, inevitably, a closed profession, and the occasional actor who enters from outside is remarked upon. Several actors are designated as living national treasures, and the leading ones are also film and television stars, which is the modern version of the old double status of outcast and celebrity.

The form has survived two serious threats. The Meiji period from 1868 brought pressure to modernise and to make theatre respectable for foreign visitors, which produced reform efforts and some loss of the rougher material. The American occupation after 1945 initially censored plays celebrating feudal loyalty and revenge, including the forty-seven ronin, on the grounds that they encouraged militarism, and the ban was lifted within a few years. Today it is performed regularly at dedicated theatres in Tokyo and Kyoto, with English audio guides and single-act tickets aimed at newcomers, and it was inscribed by Unesco as intangible cultural heritage in 2005. Audiences are older than the companies would like, and the responses have included experimental productions, collaborations with manga and video game properties, and Super Kabuki, which adds modern staging and effects and is regarded by purists as a compromise and by the theatres as the reason there is still an audience.

Kabuki began around 1603 with a woman performing in Kyoto, was closed to women in 1629 and to adolescent boys in 1652, and has been played by adult men since, with the onnagata developing a stylised rather than imitative female role. Its visible conventions include the walkway through the audience, the held pose greeted by shouted family names, the colour-coded face paint and black-clad assistants treated as invisible, and it used revolving stages and trapdoors a century before Europe. It runs on hereditary acting families in which stage names pass down through generations.