Artistic Direction in Takechi Kabuki

In the early postwar period, one man who sought to shake up the Japanese theatre world was renegade critic and director Takechi Tetsuji (1912-1988). Although Takechi worked in a number of theatrical idioms, in the early 1950s much of his energy was directed at revitalizing kabuki, both through his own productions known as Takechi Kabuki and through his writings. The present essay, representative of Takechi's work during the period, not only seeks to explain the goals of Takechi Kabuki but also includes Takechi's insightful views on kabuki history and what was wrong with the contemporary kabuki of the time. For Takechi the heart of the matter was artistic direction, which he claimed had been lost in modern kabuki and therefore had to be reintroduced in order to turn kabuki into a truly classical theatre.