Kabuki Returns to London
Updated: Sep 1
Kabuki is coming back to London.
On 30 and 31 January 2027, Ichikawa Somegorō VIII and Onoe Tatsunosuke III will take to the stage at Sadler’s Wells for a programme of classical Kabuki dance.
It will be the first major Kabuki performance in London for 17 years. The last time it came here I was 13 years old and knew absolutely nothing about it. Since then, it has somehow become such an important part of my life that I now have old programmes and posters from previous London visits sitting around my home. So when I heard the news, it felt strangely personal.
Last week, I watched Somegorō and Tatsunosuke speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo, where they announced the London performances and talked about the growing number of people finding their way to Kabuki.
One of the things that kept coming up was Kokuho, Lee Sang-il’s hugely successful film set within the world of Kabuki. Its popularity seems to be bringing a new audience into the theatre too.
Shochiku, the company that produces and presents much of Japan’s Kabuki, reported that 70,000 new spectators visited its Kabuki theatres between July 2025 and May 2026, with the monthly number of new visitors more than tripling compared with the previous June.
I’ve now watched Kokuho six times, so I’m probably not the most neutral observer. What fascinates me is the idea that a film can become an entrance into something much older. Someone who had never thought about Kabuki before can encounter that world through cinema and suddenly become curious about the real thing.
That was something Somegorō and Tatsunosuke both seemed very aware of. They spoke about people increasingly arriving at Kabuki through individual actors, films and other encounters outside the theatre itself.
That perhaps makes the choice of these two young actors particularly significant.
Somegorō is 21 and comes from one of Kabuki’s most prominent acting dynasties. His father is Matsumoto Kōsh irō X and his grandfather Matsumoto Hakuō II. During lockdown, I had the chance to speak to Kōshirō at an online event hosted by the Daiwa Foundation, where I asked him about the relationship between Kabuki actors and Kabuki prints.
Tatsunosuke, who is 20, also comes from a distinguished Kabuki lineage and only took his current stage name earlier this year. They are remarkably young men to be carrying the responsibility of bringing Kabuki back to London, but they are certainly not inexperienced actors. Somegorō first appeared onstage at two and Tatsunosuke at three. Both have essentially grown up inside the form.
Tatsunosuke made his stage debut as a child and has spoken quite candidly about those early appearances. “I don’t remember anything about my first stage appearance,” he has said. “I vaguely remember playing Emperor Antoku in my father’s Tokaiya, but as a child I was even more nervous than I am now, so I don’t have many good memories.”
Kabuki as a mirror of Japan
One of the things I enjoyed most about listening to Somegorō and Tatsunosuke speak was hearing them describe what Kabuki actually represents.
Somegorō talked about Kabuki as an accumulation of Japanese beauty and aesthetics. It was born more than 400 years ago, but rather than remaining frozen in that moment, it has survived by absorbing the changing culture, values and sensibilities of each period it has passed through. He described it almost as a mirror reflecting Japanese society through different eras.
He gave a lovely example in the white makeup now so closely associated with Kabuki. In the early days of the form, before modern stage lighting, theatres were dimly lit and painting the actors’ faces white helped them to stand out onstage. Today, of course, that practical need has disappeared, but the convention remains.
I found that fascinating. Something that can look purely decorative when you first encounter Kabuki suddenly reveals a history behind it.
The more I have studied the form, the more I have found this happening. You begin with a movement or a dance and suddenly you are learning about how a kimono changes the way somebody walks, why a particular gesture carries meaning, or how an image from an ukiyo-e print relates to something that still happens onstage today.
Kabuki becomes a physical way of encountering a much wider culture.
That is also why I think bringing it abroad matters.
The dances coming to London
The programme at Sadler’s Wells will consist of three dances: Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden), performed by Tatsunosuke; Yuki no Shakkyō (The Snowbound Stone Bridge), performed by Somegorō; and Meoto Dōjōji (A Man and Woman at Dōjōji Temple), in which they appear together.
I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Fuji Musume. I have an old programme from the 2006 Kabuki season at Sadler’s Wells sitting beside me as I write this, and it was one of the works performed then by Ichikawa Ebizō XI.
The dance centres on the spirit of a wisteria vine, appearing as a young woman in love. Through a series of costume changes and shifts in mood, she moves through love, jealousy, intoxication and longing before eventually returning to her true form. Even on the page, it is one of those works that seems to contain so much of what makes Kabuki dance beautiful: transformation, suggestion, costume, music and character all folded into movement.
The choice of all three works for London is deliberate. They are dances, so an audience does not need to understand Japanese in order to follow them. Somegorō said that people should be able to respond directly to the visual beauty and music without studying the works beforehand.
Somegorō also acknowledged that this places greater responsibility on the performers. Precisely because these are such classical works, their skill and physical expression have to carry them.
They could have chosen new Kabuki for London, but Somegorō said they chose these works because they believe in the power of classical Kabuki and want to see how that power travels across an international border.
But is two days enough?
I am thrilled that Kabuki is coming back to London, and I will probably be one of the first people through the door. But I do find myself wondering whether two performances across two days are enough after a 17-year absence.
Looking again at that 2006 programme, the difference in scale is striking. The Sadler’s Wells season ran from 31 May to 11 June, with seven actors listed alongside three separate musical ensembles and 20 musicians, before you even get to the technicians, costume staff, stage managers and everyone else involved in bringing the production from Japan.
Another programme I have, from Ichikawa Ennosuke III’s 1987 visit, tells a slightly different story. That engagement was shorter, running from 3 to 7 November, but it brought a large company to perform Yoshitsune Senbonzakura. In his programme note, Ennosuke wrote about the tour as a way of furthering cultural exchange between Japan and the United Kingdom and deepening audiences’ understanding of Japan.
That idea of exchange is what interests me most.
A longer visit does not only give more people the chance to see the work. It also creates space around the performances themselves. Theatre can be incredibly powerful, but it naturally places a distance between performer and audience: the actors appear onstage, the curtain comes down, and that can be the end of the encounter.
I would love to see a Kabuki visit to London include talks, demonstrations, workshops or opportunities for local dancers and theatre-makers to meet the artists, and even simply allow the company enough time to experience something of London themselves.
Somegorō raised a similar possibility at the press conference. He spoke about earlier generations of his family travelling abroad and teaching Kabuki to local performers, and said he would like to see a future in which people outside Japan might perform Kabuki in their own countries.
Nearly 40 years after Ennosuke was writing about cultural exchange, that feels like an idea worth holding onto.
An international Kabuki visit does not have to stop at presenting the work onstage. It can also create relationships, curiosity and exchange in both directions.
I realise that touring Kabuki internationally is complicated and expensive, and I do not know the practical reasons behind the scale of this particular engagement. But when Kabuki comes to London so rarely, I cannot help wishing there were a little more time around it.
My hope is that January is the beginning rather than the end of something. I would love these performances to lead to a more regular Kabuki presence in London, with larger productions, more artists, longer visits, teaching and opportunities to encounter the form beyond the auditorium.
For now, though, I’m very happy that it is coming back.
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