Book Twenty

Noh Business

Murray Edmond

ISBN: 1-891190-20-2
Publication: 2005
Pages: 175

Working within a lively intersection, where the theatrical encounters the critical and the critical crosses with the historical, Murray Edmond has composed a set of performative studies of Noh plays. His examples are recent ones, including some embedded in movies, some secreted in contemporary American experimental theater and performance art, some intentionally recast in European dramatic work, and some on stages in New Zealand. The resulting volume, Noh Business, is a cross-cultural as well as cross-genre masterpiece.

Noh plays are an ancient dramatic form, always strange, as imagistic as a traveler's journal, and sometimes intimate. Murray Edmond has given Noh to us now in and as a book.

Murray Edmond is a New Zealand poet who has published nine books of poetry (the latest A Piece of Work from Tinfish in Hawai'i in 2002) and edited three anthologies, most notably, with Alan Brunton and Michele Leggott, Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960 - 1975, an anthology as cultural history. For 14 years he worked in experimental theater as a writer, actor, and director, mostly in New Zealand, but also in London. He now teaches drama and theater and poetry at the University of Auckland and continues to work professionally in theater as a dramaturge. A new book of poems, Fool Moon, is forthcoming from Auckland University Press.