Illuminating the universal: the multilingual Uncle Vanya in Drive My Car

ABSTRACT

This film review explores Drive My Car's use of Uncle Vanya, understanding it in the contexts of modern and contemporary Japanese theater history and analyzing the role of the play in the film's portrayal of human connection.

KEYWORDS:

• Uncle Vanya
• multilingual theater
• modern and contemporary Japanese theater
• nonverbal communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For instance, Yul-Cheol Kim describes the influence of Japan on Korean theater, even before annexation, when ‘Japan had covertly attempted to suppress traditional Korean culture and transplant Japanese shinpa theatre’ (Fong et al., 340). Shinpa ‘was followed by the shingeki theater movement as the Japanese society moved towards modernization by westernization’ (Ibid.), though as Kim discusses, shingeki led to a singeuk movement in Korea, fueled by intellectuals aiming to ‘awaken the national spirit under colonization’ (Ibid.).

2. Miura, Artist Interview.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Nakamura

Jessica Nakamura is a scholar of Japanese and Transpacific theater and performance whose research interests include performance historiography, ethics and spectatorship, theories of the everyday, visual and material culture, and global performance theories. She is the author of Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan (Northwestern University Press, 2020) about performances that portray previously obscured topics of Japanese war aggression and imperialism.