Oldal 121 [121]
YOSHIKO TAKEBE
of Beckett. Indeed, “[t]hose characteristics of Chekhov’s plays including weari¬
ness, purposelessness, stagnancy, boredom, going round and round without ever
getting to the point all became the elements of Beckett’s drama.”®
In contrast, Hirata adapted Chekhov’s The Three Sisters into an android
drama by setting its time in the near future, and its place in a provincial
city in Japan. Hirata’s The Three Sisters was performed in 2012 not only in
Tokyo but also in France and Spain. The nineteenth-century Russian drama
was reproduced in the form of an ultramodern, experimental work that
transcends the space between drama and science.
By including an android as the youngest of the three sisters on the stage,
the non-verbal modalities are more emphasized, encouraging the actors
and the audience to become more conscious of what it means to be human.
As examined by Hirata, an android appears to be a real human being when it
is able to embody what scientists call “noises.” When a human being performs
an action, extra “noises” or movements such as pauses or breaths occur,
which are called “micro-slips” in the field of cognitive psychology. These extra
movements should neither add too much nor too little, and good actors are
supposed to be able to control them unconsciously.'®
In order to create an android that performs these “noises,” Hirata was
supported by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a scientist at the forefront of robotics, whose
research focuses on androids. They worked together on programming noises
at random to enable an android to behave naturally. The tedious, dead-end
situation in The Three Sisters was accentuated through the mechanical voices,
pauses, and silences of an inorganic android. For the scenes involving the
human actors and the android, there was a mixture of live movement and
recorded input gestures by the android. As analyzed by Ishiguro, “The human
actors developed their attitudes toward the android over the course of
rehearsals. They discovered what kind of physical actions they take when
they treat the android either as a human or as a non-human. The director
also realized through their dialogues that the implementation of an android
onto the stage enhances various potentialities for understanding multimodal,
multi-layered communication in the theatre.””’
In adaptation, non-verbal modalities play a key role in conveying the
original themes and motifs of the source text. As the three women in Come
and Go were provided with accurate timings of the pauses and gestures in the
original text by Beckett, Japanese Noh conventions (such as stylized pattern
15° Ibid., 105.
Oriza Hirata: From Misunderstanding: What is Communication?, Tokyo, Kodansha, 2012,
62-63.
Hiroshi Ishiguro: Multimodal Analysis on Android Drama of The Three Sisters: How Humans
Interact with Android, The Journal of The Japan Association for Artificial Intelligence
Studies, Vol. 29, No.1 (2014), 66-67; my translation.
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