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 The TheatreguideLondon Review

My Husband Is A Spaceman
Battersea Arts Centre 2001

Here's an opportunity for the more adventurous, and those willing to go further afield than the West End, to encounter a quite accessible piece that falls somewhere on the border between theatre and performance art.

Those with a taste for music trivia might recognize Kazuko Hohki's name from the 1980s Japanese pop duo Frank Chickens. Always more of a performance artist than a pop singer, Kazuko has been doing solo shows in recent years (though Frank Chickens has reformed for free post-show concerts after some performances of the current piece), and her new show is worth the trip south of the river.

The title is a metaphor of culture clash, with the twist that the alien is a conventional Englishman as seen by his Japanese wife. Kazuko begins by retelling a traditional Japanese folk tale that is a variant on the Frog Prince, with a man befriending a crane who becomes his wife and then departs as a bird again. Kazuko has had a similar adventure, she announces, taking us back to her days as a Tokyo OL (office lady - "I make tea and photocopies").

She befriends a duck in a Tokyo park, and is convinced that he reappears as the British anthropologist who interviews, woos and weds her, bringing her back to an England she only knew from old movies. Now she's beginning to feel like an alien herself, and fears he is transforming her into his species with all those cups of English tea, but if she exposes his secret, he may disappear like the crane in the story.

It's a lovely tale, half folk myth and half high comedy, and Kazuko simply stands onstage and tells it, in a heavily-accented English that is occasionally indecipherable. She has a few props, notably a series of things - book, teacup, pillow - with large pink noses attached to represent her husband. But the most inventive elements come in a projected video behind her, where she has concocted animated origami puppets to add flavour to the play's folk tale elements, and collages that inventively place her, Zelig-like, in a variety of English scenes.

Scenes are punctuated by karioke-style singing in both Japanese and English (and, to be honest, she may be halfway through the song before you can tell which), and the piece gives the sense more of a work in progress than of a polished text, with the ending particularly abrupt and unresolved. The whole thing lasts about an hour and is alternatingly poetically evocative, very funny, and totally opaque - just about all you could ask from a performance piece.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - My Husband is a Spaceman - BAC 2001