LONG-LOST brothers, mistaken identity, madness, betrayal, substituting one woman for another – no, it’s not Shakespeare, it’s the latest production by the ANU’s Za Kabuki Club.

I popped in on dress rehearsal for its 46th annual production, “The Madness of Ranpei” on Thursday at Canberra Rep Theatre to find to find the club’s fun-loving members readying themselves to take the stage over the weekend.

The play, originally written in 1752 for Bunraku puppet theatre – explaining some of the death-defying fight scenes that made it famous in its time – has an incredibly complicated plot, full of twists, turns and false identities, in which the chief character  Ranpei pretends to serve an aristocrat who caused the death of his father and fakes madness whenever he sees a sword, which is quite often.

The play is especially famous for its fight scenes, known as “tachimawari”, but according to director Shun Ikeda, the cast will only be doing an “imitation” of the fighting and will leave the somersaults and tumbling to the professionals.

Za Kabuki was founded by Ikeda in 1976 and it is the longest-running Kabuki group in the southern hemisphere. It’s made up of ANU students of many nationalities who join to present an Australian version of the traditional Japanese art and they embrace cross-dressing, funny surtitles, songs and references to popular culture.

Ikeda was on hand to warm the cast up and give them a few tips about how to take a subtle prompt, while reminding them to project their voices to the back of the auditorium.

President of the club Cerise Yumul said the goal was to “have fun”.

She said she’d been involved with a club for more than three years and was a former Japanese language student now focusing on honours in composing video and gaming music, something that  she was able to use in the production.

The  choice of this difficult play, she said,  was based on a request from the members  to “have a play with swords”.

ANU Za Kabuki Club’s “The Madness of Ranpei,” Canberra Rep Theatre, October 6-8.