Rakugo: Japanese art meets contemporary standup in hit show
Marry up Rakugo, a 400-year old tradition of Japanese storytelling performed in English by Canadian comedian Katsura Sunshine, with right up-to-the-minute stand-up, performed by London-based Luca Cupani, and the Leicester Square Theatre has something novel and smart.
Rakugo is both a technique and a repertoire of more than 1,000 stories passed on from master to student via that peculiar apprenticeship system that western audiences associate with the Karate Kid. Rakugo relies on a strictly controlled style of delivery: a lone performer, sitting on folded legs, tells a long-winded story by voicing all the characters in the dialogues, turning their head slightly this way or that to switch between them, and with the aid of only two props, a fan and a piece of folded fabric.
A one-hour performance might relay two short stories, preceded by a prologue where the storyteller recounts something more personal and sets the context of the show. And boy does Katsura Sunshine have something to tell: he was the first ever Western Rakugo-ka in the Kamigata tradition (Osaka /Kyoto) and only the second in Japanese history. His smile is infectious and his hair is dyed shock blonde: he’ll tell you why.
Rakugo invites us to laugh at human weaknesses and cunning gone wrong, at those too clever by half who attempt to outsmart others and fail. It draws its charm from our own foolishness and from the engaging personality of the performer. No subversion of social order or challenge to power hierarchies is alluded to: this is polite peer-to-peer jesting taking place outside the Imperial Palace, careful not to offend anyone within. It would not have survived 400 years otherwise.
In sharp contrast to Katsura Sunshine’s irresistible enthusiasm of a Canadian in love with Japanese culture, kimono and indentured servitude included, stands Luca Cupani, an Italian who adopted London as his home. In his own stand-up act during the second half of the show, Luca tells a Japanese-Canadian-London audience how he left Italy and come to the UK because he was tired of political corruption and incompetence. Beat. Laugh. He studied hard to get British citizenship, only to be left feeling, after the Brexit referendum, that he had just bought a ticket upgrade on the Titanic. Beat. Laugh. One good outcome of getting British citizenship, however, is that he has now won WWII. Beat. Laugh.
The most surprising gift of this double act of an evening is that cross-cultural self-deprecation and observational humour may be niche, but has universal appeal. It stretches your self-awareness on more than one level. It works for the comedian who, belonging to an adopted culture, remains equidistant between the original and the acquired one. It works for the audience who see the faults of the one through the eyes of the other and vice-versa.
I am not going to spoil for you the one about horses, porridge and the Lloyds Bank advert. Or the one about Katsura’s pronunciation upon arrival in Japan. If you are looking for alternatives to stand-up comedy, you’ll find Katsura Sunshine and Luca Cupani’s one hour show gentle, refreshing, eye-opening and novel.
• Kaguo is on at the Leicester Square Theatre, to book visit the website here