Seppuku. El Funeral De Mishima

Seppuku. El Funeral de Mishima. O el placer de morir

Genre: Contemporary Theatre

Not recommended for under 18s

Show duration: 2h without intermission

In Japanese, Spanish, surtitled in French

An obsessive reader of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Angélica Liddell places herself under the patronage of Mishima and his legendary death. With Seppuku, Angélica Liddell concludes her Funeral Trilogy: death, the persistent horizon of her theatre, becomes the promise of dazzling beauty. Before the flesh decomposes, is it still possible to achieve grace?

On 25 November 1970, at the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces in Tokyo, Yukio Mishima, accompanied by his most loyal followers, performed the ritual disembowelment he had long dreamed of, written about, and even filmed. An impossible, scandalous act – hara-kiri or seppuku – which Marguerite Yourcenar considered the act of a hero and his ultimate masterpiece. An obsessive reader of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Angélica Liddell places herself under the patronage of this enigmatic figure and his legendary death. For who better than Mishima to express this visceral need to unite, in a single impulse, the absolute pursuit of aesthetic shock and the inextinguishable desire for a heroic death? With Seppuku, Liddell concludes her Funeral Trilogy, which began with Vudú (3318) Blixen and Dämon. El funeral de Bergman. Death, the persistent horizon of her theatre, here becomes the promise of dazzling beauty, of devastating poetic violence. As officiant or thaumaturge, Liddell invokes figures from the afterlife on stage: her poetry blends with Mishima's dazzling flashes, with the laments of the ghosts from the Noh play Hagoromo, and opens a passage between the living and the dead. Before the flesh decomposes, is it still possible to achieve grace? To make theatre an explosion, to ask for a little more colour from the setting sun? A crepuscular work, Seppuku demands a beauty "that makes the gods weep" and makes ritual suicide the ultimate metaphor for "sacrifice as a