Suzaku Gate / Suzakumon / 朱雀門 [1967]

Researching stage plays is always fascinating to me, but also frequently very frustrating because I'm never able to turn up as much visual evidence as I'd like to. If I'm lucky, I can find promotional pictures of the cast in costume, but pictures from the actual performance are pretty much nonexistent for most of the stuff we look at here. That is unfortunately the case with Suzakumon as well, but I was able to get my hands on a booklets which has a lot of really beautiful high-quality pictures; I've scanned the entire thing and you can take a look at it for yourself here.

So, I suppose an appropriate place to start would be asking the question "what is a 'suzakumon', exactly?"

The Suzaku Gate was, historically, the southernmost gate of the Imperial Palace in the three former Japanese capitals of Fujiwara-kyō, Heijo-kyō and Heian-kyō. The gate takes its name from the Vermillion Bird (suzaku), the Guardian of the South according to traditional Chinese astronomy. No historical suzakumon remain extant, but reconstructions have been built. That all suzakumon which presently exist today are modern reconstructions of ancient structures feels like a nice segue into our play, which is itself a reconstruction: a kabuki adaptation of a story written by a British man.

Suzakumon was based off of the play Kismet, written by American-born British playwright Edward Knoblock and first performed in 1911. After several hundred performances in England, the play was eventually brought to Broadway in 1953. Kismet has been adapted to film several times; four were based directly on the Knoblock play and one, released in 1955, was based off of the 1953 Broadway musical.

Only picture I've found of Hirata during an actual performance.

Obviously, Kismet enjoyed some popularity in Japan in the middle of the 20th century, but I am not sure that this popularity still remains today. Currently neither Knoblock nor his play nor any of the subsequent adaptations of it have Japanese Wikipedia pages. A search for the author and his work in Japanese does not even bring up any subjective results (I.E. reviews that indicate everyday people in Japan are reading and enjoying him with any regular frequency), just one or two DVDs for sale and film databases. To be fair, though, I'm not even sure Kismet is that popular with English-speaking audiences anymore.

However, this 1967 performance was not the first time Kismet had been staged in Japan. The Takarazuka Flower Troupe performed the play in August of 1955 as directed by Shirai Tetsuzou, and this was a direct adaptation; the play's original setting was preserved. According to the Takarazuka Revue's official website, this performance was notable for being the first use of wireless microphones in Japan.

Poster for the 1955 Takarazuka performance of Kismet, subtitled "unmei" ("fate")

In the section of the above Teigeki pamphlet written by author Shinichiro Nakamura, he describes why he believes that the original Arabian Nights-ish setting of Kismet is so well-suited to adaptation into a Heian-period kabuki play, and draws comparisons between the two settings, even referring to Nara as "another Baghdad" and saying that the protagonist of Kismet could "step directly into the role of the protagonist of Suzakumon without creating any sense of unnaturalness[...]".

Another interesting detail about this play that we'll never be able to hear firsthand is its score, which, if it followed the example set by other kabuki plays being staged at the Teigeki in the 1960s, was Western-style. Suzakumon is considered "Shin Kabuki", which is a form of kabuki that incorporates Western ideas and dispenses with certain conventions of more traditional kabuki while still retaining its stylistic structure.

It would appear that the impetus for Toho's decision to adapt Kismet into a kabuki play in 1967 was due to the efforts of a single person; namely Toho's producer Iwao Mori, who was personally interested enough in the play to translate it into Japanese. But, while Toho describes nearly everything about the play as its own idea, its production was not solely domestic - Suzakumon was produced in cooperation with American Play Company.

According to the New York Public Library's archival page on company records in their collection:

The American Play Company was a New York theatrical agency which represented authors and rights-holders and assisted in the negotiation of theatrical and film licensing. The company originated in the 1880s, when Elisabeth Marbury became the protégée of Daniel Frohman and began representing authors and managing their various productions on Broadway, the national tour circuit, and regional amateur productions. She became the representative of Frances Hodgson Burnett, George Bernard Shaw, Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P.G. Wodehouse. She was also the sole representative of the French Society of Authors.

In 1914, Marbury merged with Selwyn and Company to form the American Play Company. By 1930, the company had also absorbed the De Mille company and the John Rumsey Company. The company continued producing and managing properties until the early 1960s, when it was purchased by Sheldon Abend.

Although the NYPL's holdings only go up to 1966, American Play Company continued to exist until last year (2025), when it was acquired by International Literary Properties. As of that time, it was owned by actor Michael Douglas, who had acquired the company in 1999.

I cannot determine how involved the American Play Company was with the production of Kismet and with Toho in general. It seems like Toho did the bulk of the work out of their own desire to stage the play, rather than APC approaching them with intent to collaborate, but then again 100% of my sources are Japanese; I would really like to be able to find a news story from an American source that mentions the play being staged in Japan, but no such thing seems to exist or be accessible to me. I would guess, from what I've read, that APC simply held the rights to the play and that Toho had to go through them to be able to stage it.

Nara's reconstructed suzakumon.

Suzakumon was produced in participation with the 22nd Agency of Cultural Affairs Arts Festival, which, as per the Agency of Cultural Affairs' website, is "an art festival held every fall with the aim of providing the general public with the opportunity to appreciate excellent works of art at home and abroad, and contributing to the improvement and promotion of our culture". Performances sponsored by the Agency of Cultural Affairs include kabuki, noh, bunraku, ballet, contemporary theater, and other forms of traditional Japanese song and dance, but awards are given also to things like television dramas, documentaries, and radio plays, so this is not exclusively a festival for traditional arts, although that does seem to have been a focus. The festival is held annually ("in principle", not sure what they mean by that) from October 1st to November 30th and is still going strong in its 80th year.

I will say that it is very difficult to find out anything about this specific play because most search results are either about actual, historical suzakumon or the 1957 Daiei film starring Raizō Ichikawa by the same name (which is just straight jidaigeki as far as I'm aware; no relation to this play).

Hirata plays Karimaro no Mononobe. He is a bad guy. I can say nothing else about Karimaro because the plot synopsis does not mention him other than to compare him to his "close associate", Muromaro no Yuge (Chusha Ishikawa), who the synopsis unkindly describes as "conflat[ing] public office with private gain and engag[ing] in rampant misrule". The lack of further information is disappointing, since the costume photo of him is so interesting (if jidaigeki is to be believed, the Heian period was notable for its cool hats):

The rest of the cast is a fairly even mixture of kabuki actors and contemporary stage actors. Likely the biggest name within the cast in terms of kabuki is the 8th Koshiro Matsumoto (also sometimes known as Hakuo Matsumoto I), but we also see people who we'd recognize from well outside of the kabuki world, like Mariko Miyagi, Mitsuko Kusabue and Mie Hama, the latter of which had not previously been in a stage play with a long continuous run-time such as Suzakumon. That Hama was a first-timer in this kind of performance makes it all the more disappointing that I can find no reviews of the play from the time.

This performance is really an example of why doing research into lesser-known Showa-era stage plays is both fulfilling and frustrating; it's fulfilling because I get to learn about things I've never heard of and I come away with it with a bunch of new questions, but it's frustrating because there's virtually no material directly related to the actual play I'm researching. The booklet is 100% my sole source of information, here. No external references to the play seem to exist.

In any case, I hope this is interesting to you as a bit of an oddity if nothing else; perhaps you didn't know there was a kabuki adaptation of Kismet. I certainly didn't, but then I also did not even know what Kismet was when I started writing this post.