The Mikado

Soon after our Peer Gynt Project we were assigned to design a castful of characters for the classic British operetta, Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’. Being the self-admitted opera geek that I am I couldn’t even wait to get my hands on the libretto. Music is an essential part of my design process, I somehow feel that sound sphere is connected to the visual, difficult to explain really. But whilst I design, I always like to have music that has some connection to what I am creating- like listening to psychedelic music if I get an assignment to do a sixties drug-induced play, etc. So for me, I like designing for opera because it comes with a ‘soundtrack’ that informs my work.

For a long time, I’ve had the idea of setting a farcical opera in a more serious context, opera such as ‘The Magic Flute’, somehow appropriately matching the beauty and grandeur of the emotions that the music conjures to the drama of the piece.

What first came to my mind with the The Mikado, was Nanking, Nanking, directed by Chuan Lu, a beautiful film that I had the pleasure seeing at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, about the little discussed rape of Nanking. I, myself had no idea about this even. Over a six-week period, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers were slaughtered and an estimated 20,000-80,000 women were raped. The deeds were comparable to those of the Nazis.

In my production of The Mikado, I sought to keep a sense of humor but receal the esoteric realities of unnamed suffering. This was brought on by my research into Japanese history—how in the late 19^th century, England regarded Japan as the greatest, most civilised country in Asia, mainly because of it’s military prowess (similar to that of Britain at the time) and development of technology.

The information at hand was all good and well intellectually, but I had to find a way of representing this visually. Oddly enough, a breakthrough in my work occurred- I realized that by having firmly thought out my ‘themes’, the visual research came out quickly and had a strong automatic coherence to it. In researching Japanese art, I soon realized that the art itself was a bit raunchy and dark.. Especially interesting was Kuniyoshi, whose ‘erotic demons’ and ‘faces’ were especially inspiring.

Another great find was the fabulous book ‘Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Homefront 1931-1945” which included many examples of beautiful Japanese Kimonos made during World War II which incorporated war propaganda .

I was fascinated with things that appeared visually, to be one thing, but ended up having a darker more sinister meaning, like the kimonos. From the outside, it looks like a beautiful Japanese traditional garment, imbued with traditional meaning, but if you look closely at the disturbing images of war printed upon it, one will come to lean it has a darker, more sinister meaning. I directly got inspiration from.

I had a distinct vision- main themes where the ties between beaurcracy , genocide, and sexual violation.

During one of our group tutorials at college, someone brought an image of Japanese puppet theatre, called Bunraku, a part of Noh Theatre. What struck me about the image was that the puppeteers were visible, contrary to that of Western tradition, and dressed in all black I interpreted this image as a delicate and tender one; a woman who is too weak to do things for herself, so her actions must be done for her by powerful men.

However, this is not to say I categorized all women in my production as weak, the villain, Katisha an elderly and grotesque noblewoman who lustily chases after the hero, Nanki Poo, is certainly not delicate. In my production, Katisha is put in a Kimono made out of her own sagging decaying flesh. Researching Kuniyoshi, I kept on coming across images of Japanese hags who eat young girls, which I thought extremely befitting to the piece. Inspire in part by Oprah episodes describing extreme weight loss and subsequent excess skin. So the concept was that Katisha’s excess skin formed the shape of a Kimono; making her a horrible sight, where no one would want to approach her. The skin also brings up the concept of flesh- lust and death. I also thought it would be quite comical as a performance, again going back to the idea of a double meaning.

All of the characters are deceiving and manipulating each other, which I wanted to be evident in the designs to the viewer, a way of visually manipulating the audience, just as the Japanese war machine or the British imperialists deceived their captors.

The Mikado

Pooh Bah



Yum-Yum



Katisha