An Actor’s Revenge aka Revenge
of a Kabuki Actor (Kon Ichikawa, 1963)
Three men, Sansai Dobe
(Ganjirō Nakamura), Kawaguchiya (Saburō Date) and Hiromiya (Eijirō Yanagi) are responsible for the
deaths of seven-year-old Yukitarō’s mother and father. Yukitarō is adopted and
brought up by Kikunojō Nakamura (Chūsha
Ichikawa), the actor-manager of an Osaka kabuki troupe. The adult Yukitarō
(Kazuo Hasegawa) becomes an
onnagata, a male actor who plays female roles. He takes the stage name
Yukinojō. Like many of the great onnagata, particularly of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, he wears women’s clothes and uses the language and
mannerisms of a woman offstage as well as on. Many years later, the troupe pays
a visit to Edo, where the three men responsible for his parents’ deaths now
live.
