Kabukuing Shakespeare: Gender Crossings in Takarazuka’s Shakespeare Adaptations

Authors

Tove Salander

Abstract

The Takarazuka Revue is a 110-years-old Japanese music-theatre company best known for its all-female casts and trouser role stars - otokoyaku. Shakespeare famously used boy actors for female roles, including comic cross-dressing roles where heroines appear in male disguise for large portions of the plot. Similarly, kabuki, in its current high-cultural manifestation as a traditional Japanese theatre form, employs all-male casts due to a historic ban on female performers. The word kabuki stems from the verb kabuku, meaning “to lean” or “to behave oddly,” which can be loosely translated as “to queer”. I argue that the Takarazuka Revue’s Shakespeare adaptations “kabukus” Shakespeare—literally, by placing them in kabuki settings, and figuratively, by replacing the all-male casts of Shakespeare and kabuki with an all-female one. This argument is developed through a reading of two productions from their 1999 series of Shakespeare adaptations, Epiphany (based on Twelfth Night) and The Winter’s Tale. Both adaptations involve the otokoyaku star crossing back and forth between male and female double roles, and in the case of Epiphany, the role of female-in-male-disguise, which when performed by an otokoyaku might be described as “triple drag.” Set in different crucial moments of Japanese theatre history, both plays employ kabuki tropes as meta-theatrical devices to thematize the Takarazuka Revue’s own location in this history.

Recommended Citation

Salander, Tove (2025) "Kabukuing Shakespeare: Gender Crossings in Takarazuka’s Shakespeare Adaptations," Comparative Drama: Vol. 59: Iss. 3, Article 2.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol59/iss3/2