ANU Za Kabuki Club’s 47th annual spring production, Shibaraku! (Wait a Moment) picks up on the perennial public fondness for superheroes.

The club is made up of ANU students who happily embrace cross-dressing, funny surtitles, songs and references to popular culture.

In a fast-moving series of scenes, the evil would be usurper Kiyohara Takahira and his henchmen are confronted a Batman-Superman figure, Kamakura Gongoro, who appears out of nowhere, shouting “Wait a Moment”.

It’s listed by the Ichikawa Danjūrō line of actors as one of the Eighteen Best Kabuki Plays ever and when I pop into Canberra Rep Theatre to watch the actors putting on their make-up, I find that Lewis Tremayne, who plays Gongoro, is copying his elaborate face make-up from an iPad picture of a modern Danjūrō actor in full make-up and costume.

Tremayne, in the final year of his masters in Japanese at the ANU, has the lion’s share of the fun, even getting to behead the baddies, a trick he tells me, involving red streamers hidden in the wigs of the actors, to be pulled out at the bloodiest moment.

Three times in the play, Gongoro gets to “freeze” in the famous Mie poses of the Kabuki where the character shows just who he is.

The play, the cast members say, is not a straight play but something more like a movie trailer which shows highlights of the show to come – a kind of a promotional piece. It features many different characters and the story is quite simple.

Celyn Reed, a masters student studying medieval European obstetrics, gets to play an imperial princess.

She reports that more than half the cast and crew are newbies, a sure sign that Za Kabuki, the longest-running Kabuki group in the southern hemisphere, founded by their director Shun Ikeda in 1976, is still going strong.

On hand is Marion Halas, who studies for a B.Phil. in neuroscience. She also studies Japanese “because I like it”. Now, armed with a box of face paints she’s borrowed from an astrophysics student friend, is doing the elaborate make-up by trial and error.

Tremayne and Reed say they believe that performing Kabuki does help them with language, especially in matters of pronunciation and timing, made easier because the intense stories are told in highly  dramatic language.

Of course, some  grammatical constructions are different in the antiquated 17th century and 18th century language. “It’s just like when we study Shakespeare here,” Reed says.

ANU Za Kabuki Club’s Shibaraku: Wait a Moment!, Canberra Rep Theatre, October 11-13. Opening night features a photo booth for audience members, run by the Japanese embassy.