ABSTRACT

Ninagawa Yukio (b. 1935) was born in Saitama Prefecture on the north of Tokyo, the son of a tailor. His mother frequently took him to Kabuki and Bunraku when he was small, and he became well acquainted with traditional Japanese theatre. He first intended to enter a university to study art to be a painter, but finally decided to join the theatre company Seihai in Tokyo in 1955, as a trainee actor, where he got to know Kurahashi Ken, the director and professor at Waseda University, and Abe Kobo, the celebrated playwright. From them, he learned theories of drama such as Brecht’s and Diderot’s and the Stanislavsky system, which he found useful when he later worked with Western actors. In three years he was promoted from a trainee to an official member of the company as an actor, and acted on television, in films, and on stage. But when Kurahashi left the company, Ninagawa acutely felt the absence of a director in the company and, being dissatisfied with his own acting, decided to turn to directing at the age of 30. In 1967, he gave an atelier production under the title of Nine Chapters from Wolfgang Borchert’s Works as his first directorial work.