Playing the Fool in the RSC's new 'King Lear'
is Japan's biggest movie star. Kate Bassett
meets him
AS a down-and-out who has to shack-up in a hovel with two raving loons,
King Lear's Fool is hardly the sort one pictures being hotly pursued by
enamoured fans. However, that is the prospect facing the leading Japanese
actor Hiroyuki Sanada, who has just a Britain to play Shakespeare's sharp-
tongued jester.
Sanada is appearing opposite Nigel Hawthorne's Lear in Yukio Ninagawa's
new Anglo-Oriental staging of the Bard's great tragedy, which - co-produced
by the RSC - opens at London's Barbican Centre this Thursday and transfers
to Stratford in December for a further three-month run.
While on stage Sanada will be wandering round the blasted heath, kicked
out of house and home by Lear's loveless daughters, offstage there's a
different accommodation problem. He is such a mega-movie star in his native
land - an Oriental Tom Cruise - that he's likely to be besieged by Japanese
tourists, especially if he stays in the RSC's company cottages opposite the
Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford.
"Some Japanese fans," Sanada tells me in hesitant English,"will follow me
everywhere, in cars, on bikes. Sometimes it gets dangerous. They've waited
like stalkers and come, before now, into my apartment. So I just have to
take care. Some people think you are like a friend or lover, I don'tknow
why."
He quietly shakes his head, which is topped with a shock of black hair and
a broad headband, before good-humouredly recalling that, as a youth, he
himself waited doggedly outside stagedoors for Hollywood celebs. "In London,"
he remembers, "I waited hours for Dustin Hoffman when he was here in The
Merchant of Venice. Only he went out of another exit."
Now aged 39, Sanada has a staggering 45 films under his belt. "My first
was made when I was five," he explains. "And from 17 I did, oh, so many
action movies - martial arts films, Samurai films. More recently, I've been
in comedies, love stories and musicals - Broadway Bound, Little Shop of
Horrors - and now I'm doing everything." He says he would like to work more
in Europe and America.
Last year, he played the lead in Hamlet (in Japanese) in a Ninagawa
production that visited the Barbican. That is where he was spotted by
Hawthorne and the impresario Thelma Holt , another co-producer on King Lear.
Hawthorne recalls: "This Hamlet had an extraordinary athleticism but also a
gentleness and a vulnerability. At the interval I turned to Thelma and said,
'What about him for the Fool?' Her eyes glinted."
In rehearsals for Lear, Ninagawa has encouraged his British cast and Sanada
to be physically animalistic. Sanada tells me his Fool is like a cat. "Nigel
and Ninagawa asked me to use many acrobatic movements," he says and adds that
he's been teaching Hawthorne some ferocious Samurai swordwork for Lear's
rages.
Meanwhile, Sanada has had to face the linguistic challenge of speaking
Shakespearean English. "I studied all year in Japan,between filming,reciting
my lines again and again, and coming to London to be coached in the Queen's
English. That was the worst, longest year," he ighs with a wry smile. "But
since rehearsals started with Nigel in Japan, it's been very exciting. We'd
go off and, one-to-one, try many approaches, many cultural mixes. Then we'd
show Ninagawa, then it would be back to our rehearsal room. Nigel is a great
actor.When he g ts on stage - whoof! He has aura," declares Sanada, flinging
his arms out wide. "But backstage, he doesn't think he's a king, which many
Japanese actors do."
Sanada himself, though sporting an all-leather suit, seems happy without
star-treatment and has no problems with his spartan digs in south London.
"Simple is best. I have a warm bed. It's not a hovel! But," he yelps, "I am
hungry!" Hawthorne, he explains, has to carry Sanada on his back every night.
"And sometimes Nigel asks me, 'What on earth did you eat last night?' So I'm
starving, just for him," Sanada cries, clasping his stomach and creasing up
laughing.
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