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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. «12 +
