Are there plays where the tsuke clappers are not used?

The tsuke is a sound emblematic of kabuki, but it does not sound continuously in every play. To restate its office: it exists to punctuate peaks of movement — running, fighting, the mie. Where there are no such peaks, or where emphasis by sound would be wrong, it simply has no work to do.

Some cases where it is dropped or heavily restrained. One is the matsubame pieces: drawn from noh and kyōgen and played against an imitation noh stage, they restrain the whole staging to match noh's formality, and a showy sound effect does not belong to that idiom. Another is shin-kabuki, written from Meiji onward. Composed as dramatic literature, these works often aim at realistic acting, and many of their scenes forgo stylised sound effects.

And the quiet domestic scenes. Depicting ordinary life, they often proceed with feeling held down, and a hard wooden crack would break them. This is truer still of the kizewamono, the works closest to realism. The absence of the tsuke, in other words, is itself a choice of staging: the quality of a scene changes by its not sounding. As a viewer, attending to when it does not sound, as well as when it does, brings each play's design into view.