The Stage Face: Making Up to Be Read From the Back Row

Kabuki make-up exists to be read. Its fixed types tell the audience a character's personality and rank the moment he appears. The actor first covers his whole face in a single colour: white for a good person or a character of high status, a colour close to tea-brown for townspeople or villains, red for a villain's retainer. On that ground he paints the brows, the eyes, the lips, the rouge and the beard.^[1]

The Japanese phrase for it is kao o suru: "doing the face".^[1]

The most striking kabuki make-up is kumadori. After the base, the actor draws lines on his face with a brush and smudges one side with his fingers, and the act is spoken of not as painting but as "taking" the kuma. Kuma means the boundary between light and shadow, and the lines exaggerate the blood vessels and muscles beneath the skin. The style is said to have been begun by Ichikawa Danjuro I, creator of the bold aragoto manner.^[2]

The colours are a vocabulary. Crimson expresses justice, courage or hot-blooded youth; indigo, villainy on a grand scale or a vengeful ghost; light brown, ogres and spirits.^[2] The shapes are named too: mukimiguma, for youthful, righteous heroes, after the shapes of shellfish out of their shells; nihonguma, two sweeping lines for calm and majestic adults, with blue on the chin for a beard and black ink at the corners of the eyes and inside the lips.^[3]

Kabuki also kept its faces. The Birmingham Museum of Art holds an early twentieth-century oshiguma, which it titles a facial impression of the make-up worn by the kabuki actor Kikumasa VI: ink and colour on silk, fifty-five centimetres high, mounted as a hanging scroll.^[4]

It is the rare case in which make-up leaves the face and survives as a picture of itself. The painted face that would have been wiped away became an object that could be mounted and hung on a wall.

In the West, it was the lighting that changed the ritual. By the 1840s most theatres were lit by gas, and the brighter light washed colour out of the face. The old method, as one writer described it in 1882, was violet powder with the hare's foot and rouge, and under hot lights the actor's sweat made the colours run.^[5]

Actors improvised; one, Herman Vezin, mixed colour into melted tallow in Philadelphia in 1857. The idea was commercialised by Ludwig Leichner, an opera singer with an interest in chemistry, who set up a make-up business in Berlin in 1873. His greasepaints were numbered from No. 1, the lightest, and sold as thick sticks for the base and thinner liners for shadows, lines and brows, and by the 1890s, under electric light, greasepaint was an essential part of an actor's kit.^[5]

The Victoria and Albert Museum's theatre collection keeps the dressing-room ritual in its equipment. A tin owned by the actor George Howe still holds the remnants of his greasepaint sticks, under a lid mirrored on the inside.^[6] A painted plywood make-up box, also with a mirrored lid, has a removable tray of Leichner greasepaints.^[7]

A red tin of Leichner removing cream No. 251 records the other half of the ritual.^[8] Stage make-up is put on to be seen by hundreds and taken off to be seen by no one, every night, by the same hands, in front of the same small mirror.

How far the stage face shaped the everyday one. The traffic is often assumed and seldom shown. Burckhardt, writing about the painted and masked performers of the Italian religious plays, could only suggest that it was possible they had encouraged cosmetics in daily life.^[9] The same caution applies to kabuki and to greasepaint. The two worlds borrowed from each other, but the borrowing is easier to assert than to document.