Le théâtre absurde au Japon. En attendant Godot au Japon
The absurdist theater in Japan. Waiting for Godot in Japan

Summary/Abstract: In Japan, as in many other countries all over the world, the sixties were a period of drastic changes. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the country started to get back to a routine existence. This paper is focused on the Japanese representations of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which was translated into Japanese in 1956 by Shinya Ando and was performed in Japan for the first time in 1960. In this paper, I also want to present the public perception over Beckett’s play during the last decades, according to the Japanese traditional theatre formulas. Waiting for Godot was presented as an experimental theater performance of the Bungakuza, Shingeki main theater. Therefore, play was often regarded as dark, difficult to grasp and meant for an intellectual, elitist audience. According to one of the most important specialists, Beckett uses the biological word « symbiosis » with a special meaning: during a crisis, the presence of another person let both of them support each other, allows them to « stand on their own two feet » in this absurd world.

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