Love’s Whirlpool

A dating evening for four couples, three beds and voyeurs

European premiere

TEXT / DIRECTION Daisuke Miura [Tokyo]

With Ryotaro Yonemura, Yusuke Furusawa, Ryo Iwase, Hideaki Washio, Hiroyuki Aoki, Katsuyuki Iizuka, Runa Endo, Megumi Nitta, Yoshiko Miyajima, Juri Takagi

STAGE MANAGER Kiyonaga Matsushita
STAGE Toshie Tanaka
LIGHT Takashi Ito
SOUND Yoshihiro Nakamura
FILM Norimichi Tomita
PROPS Michiyo Ohashi
TRANSLATION Ulrike Krautheim
LIGHT BOARD OPERATOR Akiyo Kushida
SURTITLES Chinatsu Iwaya
PRODUCTION Kyoko Kinoshita
COORDINATION Fumiko Toda

The setting is straightforward: one split-level living room, one evening, four couples, three beds, and one theme. In a luxury apartment, four men and women meet for a night. A student, a sales rep, an office worker, a nursery school teacher – strangers up until this evening – sit wrapped in towels next to each other. They chat non-stop, making superficial small talk about their jobs, favourite actors, TV series and hobbies. Time passes, and their self-consciousness slowly starts to fade. They get closer. But love is not a subject of conversation. There is only sexual gratification – this is a cool, detached sex party, free of emotion or passion. The actors remain nameless except for the labels Man 1 to 4 and Woman 1 to 4. At the end, they leave without knowing much about each other.

In Love’s Whirlpool, Japanese director Daisuke Miura, who describes himself as a child of the TV drama generation, tells the tale of the desires of a peer group that has everything it needs and buys anything it lacks. But these people only fulfil their physical rather than emotional needs. They live lives of utmost superficiality, surrounded by popping colours that match those on TV yet as lonely as late night shoppers in the supermarket.

Supported by Japan Foundation and Planning Office for Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)

In Japanese with German surtitles

Length 2h, no interval

Artist talk
30 September 2012, following the performance

Daisuke Miura was born in Hokkaido in 1975. Together with friends from the Waseda University Theatre Circle he founded Potudo-ru in 1996. Often labeled as ‘semi-documentary’, his style strips theatre down to the bare bones of performance in pursuit of the ‘real’. Knight’s Club employed this technique for the first time and premiered in 2000. Miura has since been taking different approaches to this style of ‘realistic fiction’. Miura received the 50th Kishida Kunio Drama Award for Love’s Whirlpool. His works Gekijyo (Violent Emotion), and Otoko no Yume (A Boy’s Dream) were adapted into a TV drama. Miura has also worked as a scriptwriter and film director. In 2010, his work could be seen in Europe for the first time when he presented Castle of Dreams at the festival Theater der Welt.

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