His Macbeth, set in 16th-century Japan, was the production that would bring him worldwide acclaim following its international debut at the 1985 Edinburgh International Festival. Ninagawa’s work had gained prominence within Japan during a period of social turbulence in the 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with the rise and collapse of the New Left radical political movement, which brought riots, protests and substantial bloodshed – and his Macbeth responded to the political backdrop against which it was created.
In 1972, members of the United Red Army armed revolutionary group were arrested after a shootout with riot police. They then admitted that they had lynched about a dozen other members of their own group in their remote mountain base during “self-criticism” sessions.
While sympathetic to the politics of the New Left, Ninagawa was shocked and haunted by the horrifying cruelty of these extreme factions, and he later revealed that the dead inside Macbeth’s altar were an echo of the fallen soldiers of the United Red Army.
The specificity of Ninagawa’s references and Japanese framing continued throughout his stagings of Shakespeare.
His take on The Tempest, for instance, was set on the former penal settlement of Sado Island, and subtitled "A Rehearsal of a Noh Play on the Island of Sado"; his version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featured an iconic stone garden based on Kyoto’s 15th-century Ryoanji Temple.
His popularity in the United Kingdom continued to grow, and he would go on to direct British actors such as Alan Rickman (Tango at the End of Winter) and Michael Sheen (Peer Gynt) in venues the likes of the Barbican and the National Theatre. Ninagawa was also staging other classics from the western canon, with visually stunning interpretations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (his favourite Greek tragedy), Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and The Seagull and many more, from the complex family dramas of American playwright Tennessee Williams to the absurd avant-garde of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett.
His production of Euripides’ Medea was staged together with his Macbeth to widespread acclaim at the 1992 Singapore Arts Festival. He often drew from Noh and Kabuki conventions, both subverting and celebrating them. With these productions came lavish plaudits, with critics fawning over his “astonishing visual bravura” (The Guardian) and “moments of pure magic” (The New York Times).
