What people do to other people.
So says Mitsue’s perplexed father.
Mitsue is a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. She now works in a library. She’s also a member of a club that collects folktales. She insists they be handed down as they were traditionally told. During story week, she shares them with the local children.
A young physicist, and a potential suitor, has arrived in the city. He’s collecting mishappen objects that illustrate the ferocity of the nuclear explosion that was unleashed only three years ago.
Mitsue’s father suggests ways that these objects could be incorporated in her stories. She’s reluctant. She says no art can be made from what happened to the people of Hiroshima.
This play by Hisashi Inoue proves Mitsue wrong. A story of Little People caught in Big History, it’s both beautiful and profoundly moving. It does what theatre can do so well; it makes concrete what otherwise is lost in abstraction. We all know what happened at Hiroshima 80 years ago, but bewildered by the sheer numbers, the human face of the horror is hidden.
Directed by Shingo Usami and David Lynch, this production is extraordinarily powerful. Mayu Iwasaki as Mitsue and Usami as her father deliver magnificently poignant performances. It’s the gentleness, the restraint, the unforced nature of these performances that have such an effect. “Dripping water hollows out stone” wrote Ovid. Plotwise, we know what’s happened to Mitsue, and we soon guess what’s happened to her father, but over the show’s 70 minutes, which is sprinkled with humour and infused with the warmth of the love between father and daughter, we come to feel their true humanity, in all its wondrous fragility.
In our mad world, the plenitude of pain can petrify us, can turn our hearts to stone. But stone can soften, and by arousing such deep sympathy for those who suffer, The Face of Jizo revitalises hearts that have become too heavy.
Paul Gilchrist
The Face of Jizo by Hisashi Inoue (translated by Roger Pulvers)
Presented by Seymour Centre and Omusubi Productions
At Seymour Centre until 7 September
Image by Philip Erbacher
Theatre Red 