Lost in the abyss of vengeance
Dominic Cavendish reviews The Bee at the Soho Theatre
A businessman arrives home from work to find his house cordoned off, and camera crews demanding to know how he feels about the situation.
What situation? he asks. His wife and child are being held hostage by a maniac who has escaped from prison, they inform him. Perplexed and anxious, he turns to the police, who are playing a waiting game, seemingly indifferent to the fate of his family. They even give him a stern ticking off for getting irate.
It is a scenario that could spring only from modern Britain, you might think - a land where those entrusted with our protection have their own ideas about law and order, and the devil take the ordinary citizen if he or she dares murmur any complaint. Except that this is Tokyo, 1974 - as envisaged by Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui - and our sympathy for the businessman's plight is swiftly tempered by what happens next.
Bringing an absurd logic to bear on the situation, the man visits the home of the hostage-taker's wife and child, and, with the aid of a cop's stolen handgun, takes them hostage as a means of securing his loved ones' release. So begins a rapid descent into a moral abyss where the roles of victim and perpetrator blur into one: the respectable Ido finds that he's more than capable of rape and tit-for-tat mutilation.
Tsutsui's neat short story, originally called Plucking at Each Other (Mushiriai), has been brought to the stage by Irish writer Colin Teevan and Hideki Noda, who co-writes, directs and stars in the show. Noda, you might recall, earned excoriating reviews for a piece called Red Demon at the Young Vic a few years back. Well, he has redeemed himself thoroughly here.
The Bee has the childlike simplicity of a parable, and its message - that retribution is futile, as self-destructive as a bee's sting - uncontroversially sides against vigilantism. But the show's deranged tone does justice to the subject's complexities. With a cast of four engaging in rampant cross-dressing and playing 10 roles between them, the evening swings from hyperactive satire to thought-provoking nightmare.
Having already chalked up King Lear and Richard III, that diminutive actress Kathryn Hunter has no trouble at all slipping into Ido's besuited, slick-haired demeanour and increasingly monstrous mindset. At once childlike and world-weary, she's fantastically adept at the moments of physical comedy - getting ludicrously caught up in a cat's cradle of elasticated police cordons, for example.
Thanks to her slightly sinister androgynous appearance, though, you absolutely feel the menace of scenes in which she simulates coarse sex with the captive woman and coldly snaps the pencils that stand in for her captors' fingers (Noda plays the helpless mother and Glyn Pritchard the hapless child).
Designer Miriam Buether's ingenious wall of tinted glass doubles up as a hall of mirrors, creating receding vistas of reflections and a gathering sense of imprisoning emptiness. It is a short, sharp shock of a play. Make a beeline for it.
Until July 15. Tickets: 0870 429 6883
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Evening Standard ****
In the end, one family is just like another
Here’s a stylish storyline that would have made a great winning submission for The Play’s The Thing. A man comes home from work one evening to find that a gunman has taken his wife and son hostage. The man sees one solution: to do the same to the gunman’s family.
Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1970 short story provided Hideki Noda and Colin Teevan with script inspiration: thus the hero turned anti-hero is a Tokyo salaryman, Mr Ido.
Pursued by a media desperate for on-air emotion and frustrated by plodding police procedure, Ido comes to a conclusion startling in its simplicity. “I find I have no aptitude for playing the victim,” he announces as he steals a policeman’s gun and establishes a parallel siege situation.
The evening’s multi-tasking award goes to Noda, who has not only written, but also acts and directs. Manga comic-strip frenzy prevails initially as the four strong cast rush around playing hacks and coppers, but once Ido has barred the door of his new apartment the action becomes classically streamlined.
There’s a sense of Noda drawing effectively on his homeland’s stylised, centuries-old theatrical tradition, as words peter out and minimalist slow-motion tableaux take over. There are no explicatory soliloquies of inner anguish here and the piece feels fresher, if stranger, for it.
Ido’s increasing swagger presents no problems for Kathryn Hunter, an actress who has previously taken title roles in Richard III and Lear.
One woman, one home and one child are much the same as another, Ido concludes with barely a ripple of conscience.
The held-up wife, magnificently played by Noda, moves incrementally from gorgon to geshia. How easily, The Bee reminds us chillingly, we accept a new status quo, even if the idea of it outraged us yesterday.
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The Bee
Sam Marlowe at Soho Theatre, W1
Lurid, fast-moving, preoccupied with sex and violence, this collaboration between the Japanese director and actor Hideki Noda and the British writer Colin Teevan resembles a Manga cartoon. Based on a 1970s short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, it sees Mr Ido, a respectable businessman, returning home from the office on his six-year-old son’s birthday to find that an escaped criminal, Ogoro, is holding his wife and child hostage. With little help forthcoming from the doltish police or the scandal-hungry media pack, he decides on drastic tit-for-tat: he goes to Ogoro’s house and imprisons his family. A stalemate ensues, with the women and children victims of escalating brutality as each man seeks to top his counterpart’s most recent atrocity.
Performed on Miriam Buether’s mirrored set, Noda’s frenetic production is full of parallels and reversals. There’s a nod to the kabuki tradition of male actors playing female roles in Noda’s own performance as Ogoro’s wife, which shifts from comically outraged to hysterical and then tragically resigned.
Kathryn Hunter, diminutive in suit and tie, is equally remarkable as Ido, surrendering to a sadistic pleasure interrupted only by the terror he feels when pestered by a buzzing bee.
There’s also much slick theatricality: rubber bands become noodles and pencils chopsticks or fingers to be chopped off; actors switch character by donning a hat; and the nasty domestic routine of Ido and Ogoro’s wife and son, which combines meals and laundry with rape and mutilation, is played out with the elegance of a tea ceremony.
Yet the significance behind the grisly surface gloss is unclear. What exactly turns Ido into a psychopath? The play could be an indictment of social division or the dehumanising effects of corporate life. Equally, it implies that the media fuels an appetite for horror while diminishing its impact. But it could also be a political parable, pointing up the way in which two opposing forces once entrenched in vendetta, can only spiral into ever more heinous violence.
This is vivid, imaginative work: but its multiple reflected images never quite coalesce.
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The Bee
Soho, London
Lyn Gardner
Friday June 30, 2006
Guardian
When a bee stings, it dies. It may destroy the creature that threatens it, but in the process it destroys itself. So it proves for Mr Ido, a successful Japanese businessman, who returns home from work one evening ready to celebrate his son's sixth birthday and have sex with his wife (it is a Thursday, and Thursday is their love-making night) only to discover that his wife and child have been taken hostage by an escaped convict.
Finding the media intrusive with their prurient demands to know how he is feeling, and realising that police incompetence will make a dismal situation worse, Mr Ido takes matters into his own hands. He goes to the house of the convict's wife and child and takes them hostage himself.
When the chief of police berates Ido for bashing a policeman on the head in the process, claiming the officer was a fine man who was committed to protecting decent society, Ido merely replies: "I was a member of that society until quite recently, but I found I have no aptitude for being a victim." In fact, as the situation escalates, Mr Ido displays an aptitude for revenge and a flair for combining sex and violence.
Based on a short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, this satire on what happens when the victim becomes the aggressor is extremely simple but lifted out of the ordinary by Kathryn Hunter's superb gender-bending performance as the ruthless Mr Ido, and by Hideki Noda's production in which the everyday and the bizarre, the real and the surreal become as mangled as a bowl of noodles. It is a slightly weird and wholly unsettling 75 minutes
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Financial Times****
The Bee, Soho Theatre, London
by Sarah Hemming
Published: June 29 2006 18:25 | Last updated: June 29 2006 18:25
Seldom have the humble pencil and elastic band been put to such eloquent use on stage. This adaptation of a story by Yasutaka Tsutsui revels in ingenious deployment of simple objects to create a world that is playful and sinister, beautiful and brutal.
The story is about Mr Ido, a Japanese businessman, who returns home to find his house surrounded by cameras, cordons and cops. His wife and child have been taken hostage by a desperado who has escaped from prison. Mr Ido finds himself expected to play the role of anguished victim. But, being a successful businessman, he is schooled in the art of closing a deal.
He visits the fugitive¡¯s wife and child ¨C and takes them hostage in return. This throws all protocol into disarray. Soon a stand-off begins between the two men, who resort to increasingly gruesome tactics to try and wear one another down.
The play explores ruthlessness and the art of playing the role of victim or aggressor. It also suggests that a streak of merciless cunning lies beneath the veneer of polite society. But most disturbingly, Colin Teevan¡¯s adaptation, together with Hideki Noda¡¯s inventive production, draw links between comedy and pain, beauty and cruelty, particularly as associated with Japanese culture.
The central parts are cast against gender, with Kathryn Hunter playing the rapacious businessman and Noda playing his female victim ¨C both superbly well. And Noda¡¯s direction makes brilliant use of simple props to charm and disarm. The pencils and elastic bands with which a useless detective fiddles suddenly become chopsticks and noodles. Mr Ido uses pencils as fangs when he plays monsters with the captive child. We are more receptive then ¨C and utterly shocked ¨C when these innocuous lengths of wood come to represent severed fingers. Noda uses stylisation to make the cruelty seem more real and vivid. The piece ends by repeating a gruesome sequence over and over, to the humming chorus from Madama Butterfly, until, to our relief, the sequence becomes abstract and beautiful. So the play requires all of us, before Miriam Buether¡¯s mirrored set, to examine our reactions to the representation of pain.
Tel 0870 429 6883
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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Time Out*****
The Bee
Until Jul 15, Soho Theatre=
This is a highly unusual theatrical gem: part slapstick comedy, part satire, part macabre dance. It takes place on a set that looks like an ornament – with its transparent red-glazed floor and darkly reflective glass backdrop – yet the almost ritualistic violence that transpires is strikingly at odds with the fragile aesthetic.
‘The Bee’ is based on a Japanese short story about a man, Ido, who comes back from work to discover that his wife and son have been taken hostage in their own home by a criminal, Ogoro. Besieged by reporters, he makes it his business to find out where the hostage-taker lives, before going there and exacting a prolonged and sadistic revenge on the criminal’s own wife and son.
The tale of Ido’s strange counter-attack has been adapted by prominent Japanese director Hideki Noda and playwright Colin Teevan, and the result’s both beautiful and beguilingly idiosyncratic. Its success is due not least to Kathryn Hunter’s transformation into Ido. Diminutive and silvery-voiced, she comes across at first like a Japanese Dudley Moore. It is she who negotiates the crucial shift in tone that gives the play its distinctive flavour – capturing first the absurdist humour, and then the creeping sinister quality of Ido’s agenda.
If her versatility informs this production, so too does Noda’s: not only does he pull off a series of dazzling coups de théâtre as director, he also cross-dresses (with kabuki echoes) as Ogoro’s wife. ‘She’ maintains such dignified grace during Ido’s barbaric treatment of her and her son, that the production’s absurd appeal is paradoxically intensified because of its emotional reality.
Miriam Buether’s design provides the ideal frame: not least with its glass backdrop, shifting between opaqueness and transparency to reveal alternative perspectives. A stirring soundtrack sets the seal on this disturbing box of delights.
Rachel Halliburton, Mon Jul 3
