Properties
There are few or no “stage properties” of any kind. Just as there is no scenery and the images of the places in which the action lies must be evolved in their own minds by the spectators, guided by the descriptive passages of the play; so also there are no appliances. If the actors, for instance, have to enter a boat and be rowed across a stream, they will perhaps merely step over a bamboo pole. If one of the characters has to ladle up water and offer it to a fainting warrior, the whole action is accomplished with a fan. Sometimes there may be a little in the way of properties—for example, the arbour-like bowers in plate 3, p. [14], which are drawn on to the stage and represent dwellings, and in plate 4, p. [16], where the little temple bell is brought into the action. But even in such cases the actors have to create an illusion round the accessories by their words and motions.
We scarcely need to be reminded that Shakespeare’s plays were originally written for a stage which had but little more in the way of properties, and that even to-day there are not a few persons who feel that Shakespeare’s finest passages do not gain but actually lose by the life-like and elaborate settings of the modern stage.
When one hears the Nō called archaic and primitive because of their absence of scenery and the child-like simplicity and artlessness of the properties one feels it is by a critic who is confusing values. “Words which unaided can hold an audience, a drama which can paint the scene directly on the mind with little intervention of the eye, is surely not rightly described as primitive.”
Plate 4.
MIIDERA
This print, taken from a Japanese coloured woodcut, illustrates the central figure of a Nō drama, with the single, most characteristic piece of stage “property,” belonging to the play. The figure is that of a mother, well-nigh mad with grief at the loss of her child, (note the bamboo in her hand, a symbol of her state) who sets out to seek him. She finds the little one at the Temple of Miidera, a view of which is inset in the black circle on the left of the print. The model of a temple bell in red lacquer beneath this is mounted on roller feet, and is an illustration of the piece of property which is all that represents the temple on the stage, and is a good example of the simplicity of the stage-mounting of the Nō pieces.