Simon McBurney's production of Shun-kin has all the jewelled ornamentation of a Fabergé egg - you relish the external details but wonder what's on the inside. On the inside are a few nasty spikes as the egg shuts around the audience like an iron maiden.
       The play is based on the writings of the Japanese novelist and aesthete Jun'ichiro Tanizaki whose essay In Praise of Shadows described an oriental aesthetic as opposed to Western Englightenment values: where the West seeks light, clarity and progress, Tanizaki argues, that oriental art dwells on ambiguity and the beauty of shadows. Shun-kin focuses on the ghostly indistinct textures of the shadow relationship between upper class shamisen playing Shun-kin and her male servant, Sasuke. A couple who keep their affair secret and give up their children for adoption.
       Sasuke has looked after the beautiful Shun-kin ever since she became blind as a child . In typically sadistic fashion her blindness is attributed to a jealous nursemaid dripping infected urine into her eyes but this version is disputed. On the stage there are three narrators all offering different versions of the truth, clearly ambiguity is central to the Japanese aesthetic but this felt rather over-laboured. Blindness has an erotic charge for Sasuke the male servant, holding her cool and capricious hand he unwittingly strays into a highly-charged universe of touch and massage. He must do everything for his mistress, and understandably develops an infatuation.
       The early stages are brilliantly realized by a puppet version of Shun-kin who berates her clumsy servant with harsh, hysterical laughter, beating him with the hard plectrum with which she plays her shamisen. The sex between them is enacted rather wonderfully with her segemented puppet legs wrapping themselves around his back. As the precise rituals and repetitions of their sado-masochistic relationship are enacted and then re-enacted the play's structure mimics the repetitive nature of perversion, there can be no progress only repeated scenes of washing and beating, culminating in Shun-kin kicking Sasuke in the jaw when he's suffering from terrible toothache.
       One could see the play as a victory for female empowerment. What can a woman banished to the shadows of her traditional nineteenth century home (darkness was so desirable that women were encouraged to black out their teeth - can you imagine Wrigleys spearmint gum adopting such marketing tactics?) do other than take erotic revenge on a male underling? More likely is that Tanizaki was merely pleasing himself with all the little fetishistic details: Shun-kin's endless clean underwear, her need for her skin to be always smooth. But strangely for a play with so much pent-up sexuality it rapidly ran out of steam. Part of the problem is that the play lacks any metaphoric life - there is no universal application outside the play just the play itself and its picturesque and tasteful Japanese cruelty: blood flows in red paper ribbons, blows to the head are exquisitely choreographed in slow motion. Unlike Strindberg's Miss Julie where the sado-masochistic relationship between Jean andMiss Julie has universal appeal because of its insights into hysteria and its ability to show the aristocracy losing its grip, Shun-kin is backward looking and is actually acelebration of aristocratic abuses. It is more of a how-to-guide rather than a commentary, relishing in little technical turns of the thumbscrew. In a sense there is no ambiguity in the realm of the shadows, Mistress and servant cling to unchanging roles. There is none of Strindberg's ambiguity about Miss Julie's motives and her fury that Jean, although her subordinate, clearly sees himself morally superior as a man. Shun-kin lacks dramatic conflict, if people are happy to serve and be beaten into the bargain what can you do?
       Afterwards I felt I'd been through the mill without benefit of catharsis. One could be seduced by the ornamental unrealness of this Fabergé egg but it could only elict oohs and ahs rather than any emotional reaction.
Daniel Jeffreys