Barely a fortnight afterwards, he bounced straight back into rehearsals of the Noh plays. Something, in other words, that would wake up all those slumbering schoolgirls. The phrase you most frequently hear him use in rehearsal is kanno-teki , which means something like sensuality, tactility or voluptuousness. The immediately striking feature of a Ninagawa rehearsal is its completeness. Most of the high-tech elements of set and lighting are in place.
Technicians sit poised behind banks of computers.
The cast would not dream of rehearsing out of costume, nor would they turn up on day one without memorising their parts beforehand. It is a far cry from the usual spectacle of British actors holding scripts in front of their faces and shuffling around a church hall with bits of tape on the floor. Ninagawa himself sits at the back, strokes his chin and barely says a word, but for a few timely interventions to up the kanno-teki ante. It's a mesmerisingly intense experience - about as close as you can come to watching a wizard at work. I thought they were so accomplished as literature that there was nothing I could add to them.