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YOSHIKO TAKEBE
Like the characters in Beckett’s plays, the protagonists in Chekhov’s The Three
Sisters merely wait to go to Moscow, although there are, compared to Beckett’s
monotonous plot, more realistic dramatic events happening offstage that
can logically be explained and which are relevant to the characters onstage,
effectively drawing attention to the unchanged situation of the three sisters.
This aesthetics of silence has in turn influenced the work of Hirata. He has
established his “quiet theatre,” in which the plays are performed overseas and
are particularly popular in France.
While Chekhov and Beckett both incorporate absurdity and a silent
structure onstage, Hirata makes these elements more familiar, realistic,
modern, and more suited to the lives of the twenty-first-century audience.
Especially in his android version of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, the
nineteenth-century drama has been adapted into a near-future society for
the twenty-first-century audience, where silence will be ubiquitously found in
the universe more mechanical and inhuman.
Trusting the eloquence of silence onstage, the representations depicted by
Chekhov and Hirata are similar to Beckett’s characters, however, in the sense
that they “are trapped in a tragedy of language, not of action”™ and that they
“are traumatized, alienated, frequently dismembered, a foreign body charged
with wayward energies, refused any unproblematic access to language, and,
consequently, foreigners within it.”
Moreover, in the cases of Chekhov and Hirata as well as Beckett, translating
the spoken lines of the characters into Japanese — whether non-verbal
language or the mechanical language of an android — reveals the verbal
impotence and dysfunction contained in the drama. On the other hand,
translating the stage directions for movements, gestures, sounds, costumes,
setting, lighting, and pauses discloses the non-verbal depth and richness of
the theatrical aesthetics.
Thus, the static atmosphere created by the nineteenth-century Chekhov was
not only inherited by the twentieth century Beckett but also emphasized by
the twenty-first century Hirata in the android version of The Three Sisters.
Hirata, who attempts to fill in the gap between expressions on the stage
and our real life, aims to represent chaotic situations through verbal lines
and physical movements onstage that emulate our modern reality, rather
than faithfully following the social background of the play. While Chekhov
illustrated solitude, stillness, and silence as the themes of his drama, Beckett
employed these elements as the physical, non-verbal characteristics of his
theatrical aesthetics. In other words, Chekhov deals with characters who
4 Sinéad Mooney: Foreign Bodies, in: A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation, Oxford,
Oxford University, 2011, 170.
> Ibid.
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