Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has introduced a new way for participants to present their work via on-demand streaming, even from afar.
In 2025, Setagaya Silk, a Tokyo-based theater company led by Honoo Horikawa, also decided to participate via on-demand streaming, and now, in 2006, it is streaming “Fires on the Plain” for the second consecutive year through CArts’ online on-demand service.
Hideki Nagai plays a Japanese soldier ‘Tamura’
Based on Shōhei Ōoka’s award-winning 1951 novel that Horikawa has adapted for the stage, “Fires on the Plain” premiered during the SCOT Summer Season 2024 and was subsequently performed to considerable acclaim at the Toyooka Theater Festival 2024. Since then, the production has been repeatedly restaged on-demand at theater festivals overseas. Then, a revival in Tokyo in July 2026, drew a crowd of eager theatergoers and closed with excellent reviews.
Director Honoo Horikawa
“Fires on the Plain” is a one-man play in which Tamura, a Japanese soldier, wanders the wilderness on the Philippine island of Leyte toward the end of World War II. There, amid the extreme conditions of war and starvation, he continually confronts the abyss of death and humanity, and reviews from the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival highlighted the work’s powerful impact.
“For me, the play had one central theme: the transition of this small pocket of humanity from its almost ritualistic focus on order and control towards madness, chaos, despair and eventually even cannibalism.”
(Edinburgh Guide）
“Hideki （Nagai) makes each character real and multi-faceted, not forgetting the base emotions that affect a human being as his cause becomes more desperate.” （Lou Reviews）
Now, more than 80 years after the war’s end, as memories of it grow distant, why not spend this summer reflecting on the question “What is war?” by watching this production that addresses that very question?
“Fires on the Plain” on-demand
https://res.cthearts.com/event/34:5026/34:82037
For more details: