By Peter Maddern
There is something deeply arcane about baseball that it can both captivate and bore people. It is described as America’s national past time and those in its swoon, in much the same way test cricket used to, can be hard to decipher even when speaking the same language.
Toshiki Okada’s God Bless Baseball presents three such souls – a middle aged man knowledgeable about the game but possessed of haunting playing memories and how it came to define his father’s relationship – and two women, totally clueless about the basics and mechanics of the game but nonetheless caught up in the impact it has on those around them; their local towns and stars of the game in the media. Amongst them arrives a pseudo Ichiro Suzuki, a former Japanese star of the American big leagues, who both enchants and challenges them to see beyond the game.
A part of that greater picture is the relationship of baseball between Japan, Korea and Taiwan on the one hand and the United States on the other – is baseball, like their countries, something their own or they just in thrall of a super power? Okada’s play poses these questions with some impact in the last 20 minutes, his characters drawn out of their coy and bashful modes and asked to make some determinations of where these things stand. Though, it must be said that the torn emotions they generate may seem foreign to Australian ears and eyes.
Nonetheless, the language of Japanese of theatre shown here is, like Miss Revolutionary – Idol Berserker last year, bold and exciting, taking audiences to places they would rarely otherwise inhabit for an evening. In Berserker patrons were covered in food; here a fire hose makes its debut in the Space.
God Bless Baseball is an engaging opportunity to be immersed in the twin and overlapping worlds of East Asia countries and the game itself.
Kryztoff Rating 3.5K
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