Dostoevsky Meets Kabuki Theatre: Andrzej Wajda’s Forgotten Japanese Experiment

nastazja-wajda-1994-fot-13b3.jpg, default, 'Nastasja', directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1994, photo: H.I.T. / TV Tokyo

Why did Andrzej Wajda, a Polish director, choose to adapt the Russian novel ‘The Idiot’ into a Japanese film? Although it resulted in one of the most original projects in Polish cinema, the film has faded away into obscurity. Here is the story of Andrzej Wajda’s ‘Nastasja’.

If you asked a lover of Polish cinema to rank Andrzej Wajda’s films, Nastasja would probably come near the bottom. Even at the time of its premiere, critics reacted with surprising indifference, and over the years it became one of the director’s most forgotten works. The 2010s in Polish cinema saw a revival of overlooked and ‘weird’ films – such as the resurgence of Marek Piestrak’s horror movies or the return of Żuławski’s She-Shaman – but Nastasja never got a second chance, despite being one of the most unconventional and original projects in Polish film history.

In 1993, Andrzej Wajda took on the challenge of adapting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot – or more precisely, a section of the novel he had already used in two stage productions, Nastasja Filipowna and Nastasja. But the key challenge he gave himself for this film version was to make it in Japanese, casting Bandō Tamasaburō, a renowned kabuki actor famous for complex female roles, as both Nastasja and Mishkin.

Wajda’s first encounter with Nastasja

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Andrzej Wajda at a rehearsal for 'Demons' based on a Fyodor Dostoevski's novel, 1971, Stary Theatre in Cracow, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Forum

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Andrzej Wajda na próbie przedstawienia "Biesy" według Fiodora Dostojewskiego, 1971, Teatr Stary w Krakowie, fot. Wojciech Plewiński / Forum

It all began in the theatre. Although he was known for being a film director, Wajda also directed dozens of plays during his lifetime. In 1977, on the stage of the Stary Theatre in Kraków, he presented Nastasja Filipowna, his interpretation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, with memorable performances from both Jan Nowicki (as Rogozhin) and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (as Mishkin). The story behind the play’s creation would merit an article of its own – before the premiere, Wajda held ticketed dress rehearsals open to the public, allowing audiences to observe the creative process. This project, called 27 Rehearsals of ‘The Idiot’, ran from 8th January to 16th February 1977, and was a huge strain, especially for the actors, who revealed the most intimate moments of their work in front of an audience, unable to hide behind their roles. The strain eventually led to Wajda stopping the rehearsals from being open before all 27 were complete.

The provocative production process became a noted part of the Stary Theatre’s history. Joanna Walaszek writes about it in the magazine Konteksty:

Wajda didn’t imitate nor mechanically repeat the achievements of the avant-garde, although certainly ‘Nastasja Filipowna’ grew from that soil. He sought his own answers to questions about the relationship between stage and audience, and he explored, in his own way, the areas between theatre genres and art forms that fascinate so many artists. All within repertoire theatre.

But this wasn’t the end of Wajda’s journey with Dostoevsky. Twelve years later, he returned to the Russian writer in entirely new circumstances: producing a theatrical remake of his own play in Tokyo.

An adventure in Tokyo

The production he staged in winter 1989 was the result of Wajda’s encounter with an actor who completely fascinated him: Bandō Tamasaburō, one of the greatest onnagata – specialists in female roles in kabuki theatre. Wajda first saw him in a stage version of The Lady of the Camellias, playing Marguerite. In Ireneusz Engler’s documentary Kreacje Tamasaburō Bandō (The Creations of Bandō Tamasaburō), Wajda’s wife, Krystyna Zachwatowicz, recalls:

The whole presentation followed a conventional European theatre format, so the other female roles were all played by women, and it was simply unbearable to watch. Tamasaburō, against the background of these women – who may have been good actresses but in comparison seemed horrible, with something false about them. [...] But he was a true woman, and there’s some total mystery in that.

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Wajda saw in him a new Nastasja. In the documentary, he enthuses:

He’s one of the most talented actors I’ve ever met. His range is astounding, traditional theatre, films. He is perhaps the only kabuki actor who has played female roles from the major European repertoires: Lady Macbeth, Phaedra, Juliet in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Nastasja Filipowna, and many more women. It was only in ‘Nastasja’ that he decided to play a male role. He hesitated, worrying about damaging the stage image he had built for years. Let’s remember that in Japan, he’s as popular as Liz Taylor in the USA.

Wajda cast Tamasaburō as both Nastasja and Mishkin. For the first time, he asked him to play a male role, a new challenge for the Japanese actor. ‘I myself would never dare disrupt my own stage image,’ Tamasaburō said in a TV interview, ‘but with Wajda I managed to draw all of this out of myself, and to the extent of my abilities Wajda expanded this state of unconsciousness in me.’

In Wajda’s play, Mishkin – observed by the obsessed Rogozhin – suddenly transformed into Nastasja, with Tamasaburō combining both characters. ‘I think this is the most spiritual thing I’ve managed to do in theatre, it’s pure theatre,’ said Wajda. ‘The moment he changed from man to woman was so astonishing for the audience and for us (after all the rehearsals and performances) that it was hard to believe what we were seeing with our own eyes.’

For the Japanese version of The Idiot, Wajda had gathered a trusted team: Krystyna Zachwatowicz designed sets and costumes, and Maciej Karpiński (future co-writer of the film version) was his assistant. Together, they created a production radically different from the Kraków staging. Theatre expert Joanna Walaszek commented:

Only during the performance do you see how different these stagings are. Astonishingly different. Each stands out – poetics, adaptation, acting. Each has grown from a completely different theatre vision. You feel not only the distance between the cultures of Poland and Japan, but also between searches in theatre at the turn of the 1970s and today’s reality. One can clearly see the variety of his explorations and the evolution of Wajda’s theatrical work.

Duel of the muses

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The ceremony of the blessing of the cornerstone and the laying of the foundation deed for the construction of the Manggha Center of Japanese Art and Technology, established by the founders of the Kyoto-Kraków Foundation: Andrzej Wajda and Krystyna Zachwatowicz, photo: Jacek Bednarczyk / PAP

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The Tokyo staging marked another step in Wajda’s deepening relationship with Japanese culture. Two years earlier, he had won the Inamori Foundation Kyoto Prize, which he used to found the Manggha Centre in Kraków. Before the Manggha museum opened in 1994, he decided to once more reach for Dostoevsky and make a film version of Nastasja together with Tamasaburō. In his recently published Notes 1942–2016, we can see Wajda wrote about this process. On 7th November 1992, he notes: ‘The Nastasja film must be made. Besides Edelman, whose photography I trust, I’m thinking of getting Maciek Ślesicki as second camera – he could help energise the adaptation, make it more cinematic.’

The question of making the text more filmic recurred more than once. Together with Maciej Karpiński, he worked to inject more cinematic life and rhythm into the script. In his notes, he writes, ‘...I see clearly that this must be a film, not a theatre recording’, and at the end of December 1992, he considers the project further:

What does it mean to bring the show ‘Nastasja’ to the screen? On stage it was stripped back to its essentials – a single interior, two actors. Nastasja as a phantom in Rogozhin's mind, whom he sees embodied in Mishkin. But the film will place us in real Petersburg settings, add other people, actors, extras. It will break the old clean order, but will it create a new one? Locations will likely help, maybe even add mystery. But what about Tamasaburō’s transformation from Mishkin to Nastasja?

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'Nastasja', directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1994, photo: H.I.T. / TV Tokyo

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Elsewhere, the Japanese kabuki master was reflecting on his career, leading him to bring doubts and anxieties onto the film set. Wajda writes about it on 24th February 1993:

Having passed 40, Tamasaburō is feeling his age deeply. He is trying to start over: he’s made two films as a director. The first, really a study piece, the second – a properly made film with actors, but after being shown at Berlin Festival, it didn’t achieve anything. [...] Of course, a shameless film about himself might bring him success, but it would deprive him of a future. After all, he’s an unreal person to viewers, who only ever see him from a distance, on a kabuki stage. That sort of advice is like telling him to commit harakiri.

Even during test shoots, Tamasaburō expressed fears about playing a woman on screen, since the camera reveals the actor’s physicality more clearly than the stage. He was so sensitive that he wouldn’t even watch footage featuring himself, asking Wajda to fast-forward fragments focused on him. ‘It’s no affectation; he knows what he’s looking for and what he’s done wrong,’ noted the Polish director.

No happy ending

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'Nastasja', directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1994, photo: H.I.T. / TV Tokyo

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Production began in Warsaw on 30th March 1993, and was already wrapped up by 8th April. Like the stage version, Wajda based the film on the relationship between Rogozhin (played by Toshiyuki Nagashima) and Mishkin/Nastasja (Tamasaburō). Although the master onnagata switched superbly between male and female roles, the film version exposed flaws in Wajda’s concept. Even with outdoor shots and an expanded cinematic world, Nastasja still bore marks of theatricality. Perhaps because of this, and certainly the fact that the film was made in Japanese, it barely registered with Polish audiences. For Wajda, what mattered was the Japanese public – devoted to both Tamasaburō and to Wajda himself. When the film was set to premiere in Tokyo, Wajda wrote a letter to his Asian fans:

This meeting between the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and the remarkable Japanese actor Bandō Tamasaburō is accompanied by a Polish director who initiated the film ‘Nastasja’. This extraordinary encounter – whose results you’ll judge for yourselves on screen – is no accident. Art knows no borders. When it creates today, it constantly remembers its great past and draws on it just as much as on the present, searching for themes that are timeless and universal. I’m happy to have taken part in this remarkable undertaking, and proud that with this film I’m, in a way, writing myself into the history of Japanese cinema.

Unfortunately, Wajda’s film failed in Japan too, becoming more of a curiosity than a bold experiment with artistic weight. Compared to television theatre in Poland, and coming in the wake of Korczak (for which Wajda had faced accusations of antisemitism in the West), it was another painful experience for the director. Yet this didn’t weaken his affection for Japanese culture – as proven by his 1996 film Mishima, based on Yukio Mishima’s novel – nor his long-standing admiration for Bandō Tamasaburō.

Originally written in Polish, June 2025, translated by Adam Zulawski, Nov 2025

Tytuł (nagłówek do zdjęcia)

Andrzej Wajda Centenary

Link URL

Discover the Life & Films of Andrzej Wajda!

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andrzej wajda

film adaptation

Fyodor Dostoevsky

japanese culture in warsaw