The Lost Babylon Over the past five years I have been working on an Australian-Japanese co-production of the Japanese play The Lost Babylon by Takeshi Kawamura, which culminated in a production for the 2006 Adelaide Fringe Festival, which I produced and directed. The Lost Babylon was written and first produced in Japan in 1999 by Kawamura and his company Daisan Erotica. 1 Set in a theme park, the play is about a live 'shoot 'em up' game, wherein rich young customers play by shooting with real guns at society's disenfranchised: refugees (known in the play as 'illegals'), the unemployed and homeless, who are employed to die 'realistic' deaths. Initially the players use fake bullets but over time the blanks are replaced first by 'heartstoppers' that stun victims for a couple of minutes, and eventually by real bullets, that result in real deaths. Drawing on violent action cinema parody and gun fetish, the play portrays violence in terms of a simulacrum that slowly-and inevitably-becomes real. Eventually this "pursuit of reality", as one of the theme park customer's proclaims, backfires, as those employed to be shot at-the 'Attackers'-rebel and start shooting back (Kawamura 1999, 47). The play is best understood as a provocative commentary on the depressed Japanese economy of the 1990s and the resultant social hierarchy. As Peter Eckersall writes, the "meaning is clear": the Attackers are furosha (literally "vagrant"), "disposable", and, ultimately, are those "who pay for Japan's hypercapitalist and escapist lifestyle" (2000, 104). The play also seeks to demonstrate an inability on the part of the Japanese to discern the difference between simulation and reality whereby, according
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