Togo Igawa: how I became the RSC’s first Japanese actor
After I moved to England from Japan in 1983, I was asked to audition for the RSC. I had to prepare a set piece. As I had belonged to one theatre company for 13 years in Japan, I had never had an audition and didn’t know what a set piece was. I was one of the founding members of Black Tent theatre. We travelled all over Japan with an enormous tent that could seat 500 people.
While I was waiting for my turn in the green room at the Barbican, there were other actors with Shakespeare’s sonnets in their hands who were waiting for their turn. The piece I prepared was not Shakespeare but a short scene with Japanese soldiers and an American POW in Hiroshima Castle. I played all three characters and wore a Japanese army headband, which also became a black blindfold. It was a very physical piece, with Japanese dialogue and a part of the Lord’s Prayer in English. John Barton, who is really a living encyclopedia of Shakespeare, might have felt it was unique. Anyway, he made the mistake of choosing me for the company.
During the rehearsals of The Fair Maid of the West, the director Trevor Nunn gave me only one note: “Togo, your character, Alcade, I think he is always angry.” The next day, I started twitching my right shoulder when Alcade showed his anger. When we performed the play at the Swan’s official opening, with the Queen, Sean Bean whispered when we passed each other in the corridor: “Togo, the Queen laughed at your twitching.” It was a majestic honour for the first Japanese actor to become a member of the company.
During my time at the RSC, the actor playing Romeo was injured, so an understudy took over the performance. That understudy was my friend Patrick Robinson, who later played Ash in Casualty. We’d appeared in Aphra Behn’s The Rover together. I think Patrick became the company’s first black Romeo. I hope one day a Japanese actor will play Hamlet for the RSC.
Trevor gave us his notes very personally, one by one. He never did it in front of the other actors. The only thing he gave all of us at the same time was his famous warm smile. That never happened in Japan when I was working during the 1970s. The directors gave us a grand speech, even if it was a very individual note for an actor. If you could not act as the director wanted, they would ask you with a sombre voice: “Are you an actor?” When you failed to satisfy them again they would shout like a cannon: “Are you a human being?” Japanese directors may have changed their ways but that was typical of my experience.
I’m now performing in Who Do We Think We Are? for Visible Theatre Ensemble. The play is written by Sonja Linden and is based on the personal experiences of 10 actors between 1914 and 2014. All the actors in the ensemble are over 60 and our bodies have inevitably worn out. As I have to act the role of myself, I feel a bit self-conscious and have become a pendulum between “life” and “art”. The director of our show is Sue Lefton, who worked for many years as a movement director at the RSC, but we were there at different times and missed each other. As our show is an ensemble piece, most of the time Sue gives her notes to all of us, not individually – but she never shouts, of course! If she did, our pendulums would stop immediately.

Togo Igawa appears in Who Do We Think We Are? at London’s Southwark Playhouse from 29 October to 15 November.