Projects
At the Hawk’s Well
At the Hawk’s Well
Text by William Butler Yeats
Music by Richard Emmert
At the Hawk’s Well by the Irish poet-playwright W.B. Yeats was first staged in London in 1916 and it reflected Yeats’ newly developed interest in noh. Although Yeats had never seen an actual performance of noh, he first encountered it through the translations of Earnest Fenollosa which were being edited by Yeats’ young American poet friend, Ezra Pound. Hawk’s Well was the first of several of Yeats’ plays to show this influence.
The play has had significance for the world of noh. Yokomichi Mario, perhaps the most brilliant noh scholar-critic of the post-war era, twice adapted the play in Japanese for the noh stage: first in 1949 as Taka no Izumi (literally, “Hawk’s Well”) which followed closely a traditional noh structure, and again in 1967 as Takahime (“The Hawk Princess”) which instead took a form rather free from a classical noh structure. Revivals of the latter have been produced numerous times since throughout Japan.
The play is based on the Cuchulain legends of Irish mythology. Cuchulain as the Young Man is seeking a well whose waters confer immortality. An Old Man already has been at the well for fifty years waiting for it to bubble up, and although it has several times, he has never been able to drink of its miraculous water. The well is guarded by a Young Woman who sits silently by the well and who, when the well is about to bubble up, becomes possessed by the spirit of a hawk. The play leads up to the woman’s possessed “Hawk Dance” which leads Cuchulain away from the well and puts the Old Man to sleep just as it bubbles up. Neither is able to drink. In the end, Cuchulain leaves to seek other conquests; the Old Man remains sadly behind having spent his lifetime on this one fruitless endeavor. The English noh version of the play was first presented in 1981 by Kyoto’s NOHO Theatre Group and directed by Jonah Salz. Richard Emmert directed it for NOHO the following year in Tokyo. In 1984, Akira Matsui and Emmert co-directed it for a Sydney University student production. NOHO has since presented two more revivals of the play in Kyoto: in 1985 under Jonah Salz’ direction, and in 1990 again under Emmert’s direction.
Hawk’s Well was the first piece that Theatre Nohgaku worked on during its initial rehearsal week in Bloomsburg, PA in August 2000. The following summer again saw the company work on it as plans formed for TNﾕs first tour. Thus in September 2002, after a ten-day rehearsal residency at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, the play became the first performed work of the company with performances at Hampden-Sydney, University of San Francisco, Duke University, Williams College, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Wellesley College, and The Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH. [Richard EmmertﾑAdapted from the notes of Noh in English, a CD published in 1990 by Teichiku Records, Tokyo (TECY-28010)]
