#HF11: Japanese company canteen leads to hallucinatory tragedy of incapacity

In very different places, people can sometimes have the same idea. And even more sometimes those similar ideas both lead to something wonderful. A few years ago, mime company Kassys performed thanks to Brabant theatre Bis the beautifully sad tragedy 'Kommer', in which colleagues spent pointless time in a mourning room full of lease plants. Every gratuitous phrase was magnified by powerfully helpless gestures carried through to the absurd, to the detriment of the lease plants. Japan's Cheltfish Theatre, in Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech, uses the same principle to tell a very different story.

Conversations in the workplace rarely have much substance, and according to insiders (see the clip), this is extremely the case in Japan. Director Toshiki Okada has reduced those meaningless conversations to their bare essentials and then multiplied them. The actors then turn that into ballet, set to wonderfully cool lounge music. That ballet is a magnification of the gestures, posture changes and stretches that anyone in a somewhat normal awkward conversational situation also does. The combination is as hallucinatory as it is hilarious.

What is even more striking is that the characters on stage, despite the minimum we get to see of them, grow into fully-fledged characters, each with its own great, and above all tragic, life story. How Okada manages that is hard to describe, but anyway a miracle that does occur more often with great art.

We could blame the millennium-old tradition of brush drawing for this. The fact remains that, thanks to the theatre and a surtitles provided with sufficient irony, the cultural divide is effortlessly bridged. Together with the Japanese on the other side of the globe, we marvel at how we treat each other, and how ridiculous our normal behaviour actually is.

Seen: 12 June 2011 at Frascati Amsterdam.