On the stage
EVERYTHING about the show now playing at the Market Theatre is most unusual. The oddity starts with the title, The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories for Consenting Adults. Then there’s the presentation, which isn’t theatre as much as storytelling, using a series of pictures to illustrate the sentences.
The pictures themselves are vivid and colourful, cartoon-like and highly detailed. Japanese music plays in the background while the tales are told in a quirky and intense way, using only accents and tonality to bring the characters to life.
It’s odd in a fascinating and wonderfully wacky way, and for sheer novelty value scores a full 10 out of 10.
The Epicene Butcher is theatre in the style of kamishibai, a Japanese art of storytelling dating from the 12th century. It literally means “paper story”, which had me expecting to see some form of origami unfolding on the stage. What you actually get is a wooden frame holding a thick series of pictures that are pulled away to reveal the next as the tale is told. And what intriguing tales they are. The Butcher is an epic tale of gluttony, gore, love, lust and the craving for increasingly outlandish treats. Our hostess, Jemma Kahn — you can’t really call her an actress — mesmerises with her voice as the pictures mesmerise with their portrayals of the butcher travelling the world in search of the perfect human victim to serve up as his next feast.
Kahn lived in Japan for two years and learnt kamishibai from veteran performer Roukda Genji, one of only about 100 artists who still perform this craft. Wikipedia says it originated in Buddhist temples, where the monks used paper scrolls to convey stories with a moral lesson to largely illiterate audiences.
It was also a popular form of children’s street theatre in the early 1930s, with entertainers travelling from village to village on bicycles telling stories illustrated by paper panels that slid out of a wooded stage.
It’s certainly not a show for children now, earning an age restriction of 16 because of sex and strong language in the stories. The seven tales told by Kahn don’t really have a moral, but some of them have a punch line and they all have plenty of humour.
Kahn created the illustrations along with Carlos Amato and Sarah Jonker, and co-wrote the stories with Gwydion Beynon, who usually writes TV shows.
That must have been quite a natural transition for Beynon, because the audience is watching a small box on the centre of the stage. It just moves a little more slowly than an ordinary TV screen.
The box is balanced on an old-fashioned wooden clothes drier, and the stage is cluttered like a studio. The humour begins when Klara van Wyk, dressed like a delinquent Japanese schoolgirl, scribbles brief and pithy introductions to each story on a blackboard. She’s the Chalk Girl, a silent but essential feature of the show.
There’s a bizarre and macabre streak of humour in most of the seven stories. The dream life of a cat is a ridiculous tale told with wit and charm, all presented with an Australian accent as Kahn guides us through her delightful nonsense with scientific intensity.
A sexy scene of a Japanese prostitute came with some intriguing sound effects, while a skit on the Super Mario computer games had all the gamers in the audience laughing as the hapless hero fought off flying turtles in the quest for his lost love.
Then we had the story of Nelson Mandela, told almost entirely in Japanese but made comprehensible by a smattering of English and the amusing illustrations. Being something of a fairly tale, this is the one where they all lived happily ever after.
The Market Theatre bills The Epicene Butcher as a “cross-cultural theatrical oddity”, and it certainly is. Kahn is less flowery, telling us that, despite having performed the show at numerous festivals, this is the first time it has been staged in a proper theatre — “So thanks for supporting our tacky little show”.
Theatre has obviously moved on enormously since this early form of storytelling, but The Epicene Butcher is worth seeing not only as a clever and entertaining production, but also as a charming and saucy flashback to an almost forgotten genre.
■ The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories for Consenting Adults runs at the Market Theatre until April 21.