SOURCE: Brady, Owen E. Review of Macbeth. Theatre Journal 48, no. 1 (1996): 97-8.

In the following review of a 1995 adaptation of Macbeth performed at the Zen Zen Zo theater in Kyoto, Brady discusses the expressionistic power of this bilingual English/Japanese performance and identifies several of the production's stylistic flaws.

Seized by students in the 1960s and run by them still, Kyoto University's Seibu Kodo stands isolated in a pitted, unpaved lot strewn with refuse. This is the ramshackle headquarters for Zen Zen Zo, a theatrical experiment in cross-cultural form. A multinational troupe directed by Australian Simon Woods, Zen Zen Zo has experimented for three years with fusing Japanese performance techniques and classical Western theatre texts. Something new results: a performance text that might best be called a Butoh meditation on a Western classic.

With Shakespeare's Macbeth as metatext this season, the troupe's Japanese, Australian, and American actors created a...