The music, featuring traditional plucked Japanese instruments and wailing voices, turns the play at the end into a ghostly Noh drama, just as Kurosawa's Ran transformed Lear into a powerful Samaurai epic. The high point of the physical production is unquestionably the storm scene. Ninagawa doesn't go in for deafening thunder sheets or computer-operated lightning flashes. Instead, he symbolizes the storm with two thin columns of sand falling from the flies, illuminated by pinpoint shafts of light, and then by dropping about fifty huge stones and boulders one after the other on the stage, as if these were the cracked moulds of nature, the split germanes that make ingrateful man. The way this Asian production supports the acting of this Western company is sometimes jarring, sometimes puzzling, but never less than fascinating and startlingly beautiful.
Some culture clashes resolve themselves in powerful and enduring art.