Thebes

Kotsu-kotsu means "step-by-step" in Japanese, and the Kotsu-Kotsu Project involves rehearsing over the course of a year. Each time, the director, artistic director and theatre staff engage in exhaustive dialogue and communication about the direction the work should move in, whether that direction is appropriate and what the foreseeable potentialities are in that direction.
We will be staging Thebes, one of the works which were developed during the second period of the project from June 2021 to February 2022, as scripted and directed by Funaiwa Yuta. Intended as a performance of a modern dialogic play, this work borrows motifs from and recreates an amalgamation of Sophocles's three famous Theban plays: Oedipus Rex, in which King Oedipus of Thebes unwittingly engages in incest and kills his father, Oedipus Coloneus, in which Oedipus is banished from Thebes, reconciles with the gods and ends his life, and Antigone which focuses on Oedipus's daughter Antigone burying her brother.
But this is not merely a digest version of three famed Greek tragedies. Rather, this play recreates those three dramas in the context of a worldview in which the gods exert great influence on both individuals and groups and the process of moving away from that with modernization is underway. With the story focused on depicting the qualities of a ruler and the difficulties of being a ruler through Oedipus, Creon and Theseus, this work aims to reach modern audiences by portraying the conflict of modern man's psychological needs through the contrast between laws for humans and gods in the final funeral-centred act, Antigone.