Rashomon (play)

Rashomon is the name of several different stage productions, all ultimately derived from works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's two short stories "Rashomon" (1915), also known as "The Rashomon Gate", and "In a Grove" (1921), also known as "The Cedar Grove", were famously fused and adapted as the basis for Akira Kurosawa's award-winning film Rashomon (1950), screenplay by Kurosawa and frequent collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto. In 1951 the film won an honorary International Academy Award, following the success of the film in winning a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in the same year. The Kurosawa and Hashimoto screenplay deviates from Akutagawa's original stories in a number of ways, most notably by allowing a note of hope to triumph over Akutagawa's dark pessimism.

Neither Akutagawa's story nor any of the plays based on it share anything with the popular traditional Rashōmon (Noh play) (c.1420) about a man who climbs the rajōmon gate to see if a demon is on top of it.

This 1959 Broadway adaptation by Fay and Michael Kanin ran for six months (January–June) at the Music Box Theatre, New York, starring husband and wife Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. The Kanins' production was nominated for three Tony awards.

The Kanins' somewhat sentimental script sticks closely to the film, including elements added by Kurosawa that do not appear in Akutagawa's original short stories. The Kanins later went on to write the film screenplay for the Western The Outrage, which also credits Kurosawa and Akutagawa (but not Hashimoto). The Outrage was one of several Westerns based on Kurosawa's films, most notably John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven, adapted from Kurosawa's historical epic Seven Samurai (1954), and Sergio Leone's ground-breaking "Spaghetti Western" A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Kanins' script was also staged on U.S. television as a "Play of the Week" (1960).

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