Cú Chulainn op het Japanse podium

William Butler Yeats’s one-act play At the Hawk's Well (1916) was famously inspired by Japanese traditional Noh theatre in its use of dance, music, and especially masks. It is therefore particularly interesting that this play, featuring as it does an encounter between the classical Irish hero Cú Chulainn and the hawk-like guardian of a magic well, has seen several translations into Japanese, as adaptations into modern Noh form. Indeed, it is these translated forms of this play that are performed more frequently by far than Yeats’s original composition. This article presents an overview of this phenomenon, alongside a brief discussion of some of the background of the original play's composition, with particular focus on a number of new productions that weave together Japanese and Western influences, forming part of an ever-evolving flow of new adaptations of this play.