My Husband Is a Spaceman

Keiko is a Japanese office girl who has almost abandoned all hope of meeting Mr. Right. Then she meets Robin, an English anthropologist. They fall in love and get married. But married life isn’t what she expected. Every night Robin locks himself up in a room… while she dreams of an English lifestyle complete with endless cups of tea and discussions about Shakespeare.
Inspired by a Japanese folk tale of love between a woman and a crane, My Husband Is a Spaceman is the third part of an absorbing autobiographical trilogy, which explores the experiences and cultural misunderstandings of a Japanese woman living in the U.K.
Kazuko Hohki calls it ‘part true and part traditional’. Time Out adds: ‘It’s also part fairy tale, part karaoke sessions and part cartoon hour, fairly kooky and completely delightful. Hohki begins with an homage to the Kamishibai Ya, Japan’s traditional storytellers, relating a magical folktale in which a peasant unknowingly marries a crane. But where the Kamishibai Ya used pictures to illustrate the action, Hohki has created a film of origami figures waddling disjointedly, unfurling and re-forming, which plays on a big screen beside her. (…) It’s this concentration of detail—sometimes quaint, sometimes sharply amusing—that makes Hohki’s show such a pleasure. As a child, she says, she read Winnie the Pooh and decided the English must be clever if even the stuffed toys could engage in serious discussion. (…) The whole thing is punctuated with songs in Japanese and English and lit up with a romantic, care-free humour that can only inspire the highest of spirits.’
‘A charming and idiosyncratic dramatic collage of the silly perceptions that separate different cultures and the universal things they have in common,’ proclaimed Metro. ‘A delightful trip to an imaginative universe where—among other attributes—one hour feels like a mere five minutes’, raved the Evening Standard, while the Independent described Hohki’s performance as ‘gentle, affectionate and humorous’. This is contemporary storytelling at its very best, according to us.

By: Kazuko Hohki; music: Clive Bell; directorial help: Tom Morris, Arlette George & David Woods (Ridiculusmus).

In cooperation with: Cankarjev dom
With the support of the: British Council