My Husband Is a Spaceman
Keiko is a Japanese office girl who has almost
abandoned all hope of meeting Mr. Right. Then she meets Robin, an English
anthropologist. They fall in love and get married. But married life isn’t what
she expected. Every night Robin locks himself up in a room… while she dreams of
an English lifestyle complete with endless cups of tea and discussions about
Shakespeare.
Inspired by a Japanese folk tale of love between a woman and a crane, My
Husband Is a Spaceman is the third part of an absorbing autobiographical
trilogy, which explores the experiences and cultural misunderstandings of a Japanese
woman living in the U.K.
Kazuko Hohki calls it ‘part true and part traditional’. Time Out adds: ‘It’s
also part fairy tale, part karaoke sessions and part cartoon hour, fairly kooky
and completely delightful. Hohki begins with an homage to the Kamishibai Ya,
Japan’s traditional storytellers, relating a magical folktale in which a
peasant unknowingly marries a crane. But where the Kamishibai Ya used pictures
to illustrate the action, Hohki has created a film of origami figures waddling
disjointedly, unfurling and re-forming, which plays on a big screen beside her.
(…) It’s this concentration of detail—sometimes quaint, sometimes sharply
amusing—that makes Hohki’s show such a pleasure. As a child, she says, she read
Winnie the Pooh and decided the English must be clever if even the stuffed toys
could engage in serious discussion. (…) The whole thing is punctuated with
songs in Japanese and English and lit up with a romantic, care-free humour that
can only inspire the highest of spirits.’
‘A charming and idiosyncratic dramatic collage of the silly perceptions that
separate different cultures and the universal things they have in common,’
proclaimed Metro. ‘A delightful trip to an imaginative universe where—among
other attributes—one hour feels like a mere five minutes’, raved the Evening
Standard, while the Independent described Hohki’s performance as ‘gentle,
affectionate and humorous’. This is contemporary storytelling at its very best,
according to us.
By: Kazuko Hohki; music: Clive Bell; directorial help: Tom
Morris, Arlette George & David Woods (Ridiculusmus).
In cooperation with: Cankarjev dom
With the support of the: British Council
