+51 Aviación, San Borja

Playwright and director of the Okazaki Art Theatre, Yudai Kamisato has crafted this highly impressionistic, quirky tale of the immigrant experience and the politics of theatre-making. 

Three young Japanese actors in street clothes take turns telling Kamisato’s stories of living in Tokyo and visiting his father on Okinawa island and his grandmother who lives in the sizeable Japanese-Peruvian community in Lima.   The title of play is his granny’s Lima address. The company is in Australia, exclusive as part of the Sydney Festival’s About an Hour program.

More surrealistically, Kamisato also dreams of talking with Seki Sano, a pre-war Japanese theatre maker expelled from his country who, via studies with Meyerhold in Russia, becomes the so-called Father of Mexican Theatre.   And meeting, amongst others, a theatre critic of limited capacity.

While Yudia Kamisato’s writing rambles across realities and the globe, it also surprises with its humour and a touching lyricism.  At one moment he’s pondering the poor future of socially activist theatre, the next beautifully describing the old Japanese folk in Lima remembering, sometimes now in Spanish, their old homeland.   

Surtitles are crisply supplied as the actors, with a heightened physicality, directly deliver this immigrant story, stoping occasionally to undress and redress from cases strewn across the stage.  Brightly coloured stripes line the floor, coloured fluorescents checker board the ceiling. 

An hour is enough.  At least in translation, the ponderings on theatre are obscure, even irrelevant, but the storytelling around immigration is textured and moving.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton