His bold take on Shakespeare’s tragedy features kabuki witches, Buddhist chants and a cello-playing Lady Macbeth. As it returns, Yukio Ninagawa’s collaborators remember how he enthralled and enraged audiences

When Yukio Ninagawa died in May last year, theatre lovers around the world went into mourning. But at the Saitama Arts theatre on the outskirts of Tokyo, there wasn’t much time for that. The revered 80-year-old director had been midway through rehearsals for a new production of Measure for Measure. The show was due to open in a matter of days.

“The afternoon of his funeral, we had to get back to work,” recalls his producer Miyako Kanamori. “One of the cast gave a speech to everyone: ‘Ninagawa would have said, Don’t even bother going to my funeral – rehearse!’ So that is what we did.”

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Kanamori and I are in a waiting area backstage, Ninagawa’s favourite spot, she tells me. There’s a table with a framed photo of the director, a prayer card and a few bouquets of roses: an impromptu shrine.

I’ve travelled to Tokyo because another kind of mourning rite is about to commence: the company has painstakingly prepared a touring revival of Ninagawa’s famed sakura (cherry blossom) version of Macbeth, originally created in 1980. The cast is fresh, but everything else – the extravagantly decorated samurai armour and silk kimonos, the richly furnished 16th-century-style set, the evocative soundtrack – is as close to the original as possible.

When it visited the Edinburgh festival in 1985, this Macbeth was declared an “overnight legend”, with critics praising its bold gestures and painterly beauty. It had a special place in the director’s heart, says Kanamori, not simply because it made his reputation overseas but because it was the first time he found a form that connected to European audiences. “He wanted to go back to the origin, point zero, and do it again.”

It’s not hard to see why audiences were so overwhelmed. Macbeth – played by the Japanese star Masachika Ichimura – is a strutting samurai, bound by a strict code of honour to his warlord ruler and his extensive army. The Witches are cackling, white-faced male kabuki actors who chant shrill incantations beneath billowing clouds of cherry blossom. Three decades after it first visited Britain, Ninagawa’s Macbeth still makes much homegrown Shakespeare look pallid.

Although the director was often described as a quintessentially Japanese artist, what we see on stage is an artful arrangement of cross-cultural influences. Macbeth’s battles with his conscience take place against a soundtrack that mingles Buddhist chant with Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Yūko Tanaka’s Lady Macbeth dresses in a sakura-splashed kimono, but plays Schubert on the cello. (So keen are the producers to honour Ninagawa’s intentions that Takana’s instrument will travel to London on its own plane seat.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I am answering the question of who I am’ … a scene from Ninagawa’s Hamlet. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

“It’s a real amalgam,” says Shoichiro Kawai, who teaches at the University of Tokyo and worked closely with the director during his last years. “Ninagawa was always looking to meet Shakespeare’s world, but in ways that would make sense both to Japanese and western audiences.”

As well as being gorgeous to look at, the ever-present sakura carries a message that underscores the play’s fascination with death. “People often say that cherry blossom is in every Japanese person’s soul,” says Kanamori. “Just as the blossoms don’t last long, life doesn’t last long. It’s a Buddhist idea, but of course the theme is also very strong in Macbeth.”

Later, an assistant shows me through to the theatre’s archive, where we look through books of designs done in Ninagawa’s crisp and vivid hand. One sketch depicts a brooding red moon hovering over the scene of the hero’s death. Born in 1935 just a few miles from where the Saitama theatre now stands, the young Yukio at first wanted to become a painter, only to fail the exams; searching for a new direction, he entered drama school and became an actor. He was 30 before he directed his first show. “In a way, he did become a painter, but on stage,” Kanamori says. “And he remained interested in art to the end. He was very impressed by Damien Hirst.”

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Early Ninagawa productions were combative and contemporary, heavily influenced by the “atom-bomb literature” movement of the postwar period and often staged in non-traditional spaces. In one production, the cast entered dressed as riot police, only to be attacked by the audience. Ninagawa later recalled how in 1972 a young man, unpersuaded that the director’s approach was serious enough, threatened him with a knife. (Ninagawa took the message to heart, later writing: “If there are a thousand young men in the auditorium, I should expect a thousand knives.”)

Yet, despite making a reputation in the so-called Little Theatre movement, Ninagawa yearned to work on a larger canvas, and when he was approached by a producer offering to collaborate on a new version of Romeo and Juliet in 1974, he agreed. It featured a cast of 65 and music by Elton John – many of his contemporaries were appalled.

Ninagawa directed more than 100 productions, sometimes as many as six a year, often returning to plays numerous times. Shakespeare remained his lodestone, particularly in productions he brought to the UK in collaboration with the producer Thelma Holt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘He was a gentle soul, but he made great demands’ … Yukio Ninagawa in 2001. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Rex/Shutterstock

After the success of Macbeth in Edinburgh, the director moved on to The Tempest, which cleverly relocated the play to the island of Sado, drawing parallels between Prospero and Zeami, the founder of Noh theatre. He set A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a Zen-style rock garden – a playful response to Peter Brook’s Chinese-influenced “white box” production. For the RSC’s Complete Works festival in 2006, he offered a version of Titus Andronicus that was as starkly minimal as an ink-wash painting. He tackled Hamlet eight times, once declaring that, with this play, “I am answering the question of who I am”.

He had a reputation for being more than a little tyrannical: there are stories that he once threw an ashtray at an actor he thought was being lazy in rehearsals. Kanamori laughs while acknowledging this: “He was a gentle soul, but he made great demands. Every morning, as soon as I woke up, my first thought was, ‘What does Ninagawa want today?’ I wasn’t even his wife!”

Later, watching the curtain call for Macbeth, I see a photograph of the director being lowered from the flies to join the actors on stage. At the sight of their hero, many in the audience roar and leap to their feet. Perhaps it’s a trick of the light, but Ninagawa looks as if he might just approve.

• Macbeth is at the Barbican, London (box office: 020-7638 8891), 5–8 October, and Theatre Royal, Plymouth (box office: 01752 267222), 13–14 October.