| The profile of a promising young play company from Japan |
| Sample |
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＜Contact＞ Sachiko Miyoshi (Producer / quinada Inc.) Tel / +81 90-9393-0809 Fax / +81 3-6478-9515 Email / samplenet@gmail.com URL / http://www.samplenet.org/ 〒151-0051 402, 16-4, 5 Cho-me, Sendagaya Shibuyaku, Tokyo, Japan |
| About “Sample” ・・・・・・・・・・・ |
| It
started with my doubt about human nature. Is there a unified “human ego” at all? Even if there is such a thing, isn’t it rather a multiform, changeable and temporary thing? Through my plays I try to portray human beings as “ego-less” animals that happen to use language. In other words, we assume that human beings never actively choose their actions, but are passively made to choose certain actions. That assumption is at the base of our performance. Everything on the stage ? table, chairs, human beings, air conditioners, fences, and audience ? tempts the actors to certain actions. Actors may also be seduced by their own memories as well as by the environment around them. My works are there to praise such humans, who are passive and do not deserve to be trusted. |
Shu
Matsui |
| Profile of a director & writer ・・・・・・・・・・ | |
Shu Matsui （Director, writer, actor） Shu Matsui was born in 1972 in Tokyo. He first joined Theatre Company Seinendan in 1996 as an actor, and then also developed his career as writer and director. Both his first play “Passage” and his second “World Premiere” won the New Face Award for Writers by the Japan Playwrights Association. Matsui founded his own company “Sample” in 2007, where he is also writer/director. His piece written down for Sample in 2008, “Family Portrait” was short listed for the Kunio Kishida Award. He has also directed several Japanese productions of European plays which include “Phaedra’s Love” by Sarah Kane and “Fire Face” by Marius von Mayenburg. His play “Shift” was translated to French and performed at actOral6. in Marseille, and “Basement” was performed in Milan in Italian. Matsui is also a part-time instructor at the Literature Department of Waseda University, Tokyo. |
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| Past works ・・・・・・・・・・・ |
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“WORLD PREMIERE” |
2005.5
Komaba Agora Theater |
 picture：Akio Hato |
The
scene is an institution. In a room, a man is waiting for his turn
to have his surgery. There appears a young man who identifies himself as his son. Unexpected emergence of this young man leads the man to drift through his memories in the past. All the memories; his wife suffering from infertility, suicide of his uncle who had a business of raising experimental animals, etc. come back to him. Nevertheless, he wonders if these emerged memories are true or not. Memories of the dead are glorified in the people who are left behind, but will never be renewed in the dead. One’s character is formed based on one’s memories, so people believe, but people’s memories are obscure. This drama depicts uncertainty of how the memories form a character, using the crossed time axes and a well constructed story. The 11th New Face Award by the Japan Playwrights Association |
 c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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“BASEMENT” |
2006.5
Atelier Shumpusha |
 design:kyo photo:momoko japan |
This
play depicts with realism how a natural food store turns into a
cult-like community |
 c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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“SHIFT” |
2007.1
Atelier Shumpusha |
 design:kyo photo:momoko japan |
In a reclusive village, the villagers have intermarried for many generations following their old tradition for a special purpose. That is to produce albinos. It bears close resemblance of breeding dogs. When a huge suburban shopping center emerges, the closed village life is suddenly drawn into a great confusion trying to rehash their old tradition in the surging wave of modernization. This play portrays such confusion from impersonal perspective. |
 c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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“BURNING UP CALORIES” |
2007.9
Mitaka City Arts Center |
 design:kyo photo:momoko japan |
Lost
their goals, modern people are running about in confusion. This play portlays such modern people by eclectic mix of realism and abusurdity. First, an episode of a mother and her son came up to my mind. Then an episode of a detective came up next. Mother who had been admitted in a nursing home runs away with a helper. Her son and the detective chase after them. However, when the evaders try to overtake the chasers, their positions will reverse. Then, they first realize, “we did not have to run away or chase after.” Nevertheless, they do not stop running away or chasing after. Are they controlled by something? Do you insist to find the reason? The only answer is to “burn up calories. |
 c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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“FAMILIY PORTRAIT” |
2008.8
Atelire Helicopter |
 design:kyo photo:momoko japan |
The
play is situated in a small supermarket. They sell lunchboxes with
discount and give away the surplus to part-timers. As the play follows
the whereabouts of the lunchboxes that are sold and given away, solitary
lives of the characters are gradually exposed: the shop-manager, a
single English conversation lecturer, a shoplifter, a childless couple,
a part-timer, a retired teacher of history, her reclusive son and
her students. Can we find a thread that connects their apparently
unconnected lives? I want to portray those people who struggle to be mature. I want them to fall upside-down, go off the tracks and make blunders, half deliberately. A small incident triggers a massive topsy-turvy with a slogan: “If you find it hard to stand firm, then try falling!” There we can hear them cry “Please take me with you!”, a cry of pain and joy. It doesn’t matter where they want to be. They realise that they are in topsy-turvy for no particular reason. I want to make positive sense of such a situation, show that they (we) are no different from you, and prove that I’d love to be connected with somebody. The title “Family Portrait” signifies this impossible desire. |
c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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“BIOGRAPHY” |
2009.1 Komaba
Agora Theaterr |
 design:kyo photo:momoko japan |
A group of people come together to make a biography of a man. They verify a fact and link it to another; reconstruct a scene and interview his relatives; get carried away with their work and get out of control. In short, they pursue their raison d’etre in somebody else’s biography. It could also be said that they are just creating another “myth” although they may call it a history. |
 c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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“PASSAGE” |
2009.5
Mitaka City Arts Center |
 design:kyo photo:momoko japan |
When
we first played this piece I was often asked what the title “Passage”
means. I agree that “Passage” doesn’t make a perfect sense by itself.
“Passage” is from the phrase “a rite of passage”, but actually
the play put more emphasis on the “ritual” rather than the “passage”
at that time. Of course that “ritual” was quite fictitious and had
little to do with real life rituals such as initiation, marriage,
having a baby or death. However, it seems that the rituals of passage
that we face in the modern world require us to take part in that fiction.
We are required to play positive parts in it so that the world materialise. That’s what I thought six years ago. What about now? It’s not that different. Only that I’m older by six years. When I read the script again, I was struck with the similarity between what I thought then and what I think now. Apart from technical naivety, it seems that this piece was near perfection from the start. People don’t change. But the fact that people don’t change can be interpreted either negatively or positively. That ambiguity supports this piece. We may have put a bit too much emphasis on the negative side six years ago. This time I’d like to hit a better balance. How it will be torn between the two interpretations is the charm and hope of this piece. |
 c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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| Shu Matsui’s other works ・・・・・・・・・・・ |
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“PHAEDRA’S LOVE ” |
2008.2 Sai Studio Komone |
 design:kyo |
When we see a man who tries to take off his clothes of ostentation and eventually peel his skin to expose his true skin, how can we laugh at such a deed as a “self-searching game”? This mythical world written by Sarah Kane is actually a mirror image of our modern world. Hippolytus, who is confined in a world that stands on cover-ups and common senses that try to hide unpleasant realities, tries to confront that world with his “innocent” evilness once he receives a baton of “love” from his mother-in-law, Phaedra. However, where was his enemy in that world? Was the world really against him? Hippolytus’s deed may have been the curse against himself. |
 c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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“FIRE FACE ” |
2009.3 Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space, Small Hall 1 |
| Festival Tokyo 09 spring |
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The young Japanese renowned playwright and director Shu Matsui directs Marius von Mayenburg's much talked-about work "Fireface", which left an unforgettable impression on the Japanese audience when it was staged by the German Schaubuehne Theater in 2005. A family of four seems to live a life in harmony when the daughter's boyfriend shows up one day and the family's equilibrium starts to fall apart. |
c.Tsukasa Aoki |
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