西洋比較演劇研究会

1月21日の例会は以下のお二方による英語の発表です。題名および概要もあわせて記載します。

Oscillating Between Fakery and Authenticity: Hirata Oriza’s Android Theatre

Kei Hibino, Seikei University

Various kinds of negative responses some audience members express after seeing “Good-bye,” Hirata Oriza’s 15-minute piece featuring an actress and a female “android,” all seem to come from a feeling of betrayal they experience; having anticipated an authentic work of art, they are failed by their own expectation, for, what they think they see is a kind of technological hocus-pocus that glosses over a phony sentimental drama in essence. Their dismay may be compounded when they know “the android” does not respond even as programmed, much less of its accord. The timing of utterance is precise not because it is so calculated in advance but because a human actress offstage “lip-syncs” it. Remotely controlled by her, the android is nothing but a mechanized puppet, as we see it in a fairground booth.

The cheap sideshow quality of the production can be accentuated in the setting; the dimly lit stage successfully creates an otherworldly atmosphere, and yet makes everything on stage, including an actress and the android’s facial expressions, indistinct and ambiguous in the murky darkness. Bedridden invalid facing death, the human character is immobile, which makes a good excuse for the android remaining motionless; if it displayed more body movements to gesticulate, it would look less like a human being. The Japanese lines the American actress speaks with an obvious English accent can make an interesting contrast to the synthesized voice of the android but at the same time their unnaturalness cancel out each other. Once aware of these “camouflage” devices, audiences cannot but feel they are being duped, especially because they are motivated by the modern myth of omnipotent science to seek for something authentic and authoritative that would not be represented in a “conventional” theatre.

Yet delivering this “feel of fakery” to audiences is part of Hirata’s strategy. In the first place, like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, “Good-bye” is both a trashy imitation of the ordinary and a critique of realism that would make the ordinary special and unique through its framing effects. Yet Hirata does not allow audiences to take a critical distance from “fake” representations, just as Warhol does his viewers. Rather, he tries to ask audiences to empathize with them. Without there being such critical distance, some audiences can hardly see any meanings in cheap simulacra and make a negative judgement on Hirata’s play. But the dramatist’s intention is elsewhere. By asking audiences to interact with what he cannot authenticate, he wants to share his sense of alienation and emptiness with audiences; besieged by shoddy replicas, audiences as well as he are unable to get “the real thing.”

Most authentic of “the real things” Hirata and audiences cannot attain is death. It is true that the story is woven into the time-honored Romantic motif of the death drive, but showing the impossibility of dying here and now makes it a parody of it. Although the human character is supposed to be at her deathbed, audiences know what she faces is a fictitious death. On the other hand, as long as audiences live and are watching the play, they are also estranged from death. Thus fake death exists but nowhere can true one be found.

Following this inner logic of “Good-bye,” one only needs an easy step or two to conclude that Hirata employs an “android” as a metaphor of a countless inauthentic copies that surround human beings and make them unable to contact the “real.” In my presentation I hope to guide these steps by, for instance, relating the quoations from translated poems of Rimbaud’s and Karl Busse’s to Hirata’s quest for authenticity. Oscillating between fakery and authenticity, “Good-bye” maintains its aesthetic poise.