Entering the Coronet auditorium and seeing the set of Good-Bye took me back to the visual impact of seeing the Pina Bausch show Carnations. It turns out that this was quite a helpful starting point from which to view this piece.
With its precise and distinct movement language and its live score – provided by the on-stage rock band Kukangendai – it arguably has more in common with Tanzer Wuppertal than with a traditional Western play. Chiten Theatre Company is an experimental troupe, and its business is spectacle and sensation rather than narrative.Goodbye is stunning to look at, and the performers work together with immense skill and discipline to create this living work of art.
Whether the textual element (accessible to the Brits in the audience by way of screened subtitles on either side of the stage) works or not is something which clearly divided the Coronet audience. There were some enthusiastic whoops and cheers at the piece’s close, but also plenty of bored and bewildered faces drifting out into the night
There is no doubt that cultural knowledge (or the lack of it) was a big contributing factor. The fragmented collage text is peppered with Japanese references – geographical and cultural – which are mainly lost on a British audience. Cultural distance notwithstanding., however, the textual form is in itself deliberately disjointed and alienating.
Biblical references, ancient Greece, the French Revolution, and metaphysical angst all clash in a verbal dissonance that plays against the repetitive rock rhythms of the band. Added to the fact that the performers’ delivery is for the most part staccato, barked or shouted rather than spoken, and intentionally at odds with what is being said, and it is obvious that the audience is not being invited in here, but very much being kept at arm’s length.
To read the programme after the event is to understand that the fragmented text is a collage made up of words from the works of the Japanese novelist Dazai, who committed suicide before completing his novel Goodbye. Intended as a commentary on post-war Japanese identity, Chiten Theatre Company’s re-imagining of Dazai’s oeuvre failed to take this reviewer beyond the skilful dazzle of the spectacle itself.
For more information on Goodbye and future productions at the Coronet Theatre please use the link below.
Three Stars.
https://www.thecoronettheatre.com/
https://www.thecoronettheatre.com/chiten-theatre-company-good-bye/
Reviewed by Rebecca Cranks.
Theatre, Art and Film Reviews 
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