Osamu Matsumoto

Osamu Matsumoto

Matsumoto was born in Sapporo in 1955 and is the leader of and director for theater company MODE. After performing as an actor with the Bungakuza, company for ten years, he founded his own thatear company, MODE, in 1989. There he won acclaim for adapting and directing works by foreign playwrights like Chekhov, Becket and Wilder as contemporary Japanese plays. He has also collaborated actively with leading contemporary Japanese playwrights including Miri Yu, Yoji Sakade , Oriza Hirata, Masataka Matsuda and Akio Miyazawa. From 1996 to 1998 he served as full-time director of the Hokkaido Theater Foundation. For five years from 1997 to 2001 he served as associate director of the Setagaya Public Theatre and mounted there in 2001 a highly acclaimed production of a play based on Kafka’s Amerika that was brought to stage through a year-long process of auditions and workshops. A revived production of this play in 2003 won Matsumoto the Yomiuri Theater Grand Prix Outstanding Work Award and Outstanding Director Award, as well as the Senda Koreya Award of the Asahi Arts Awards. In 2005, his production Shiro based on Kafka’s The Castle again won him the Yomiuri Theater Grand Prix Outstanding and Outstanding Director Award Work Award. In addition to his series of works based on Kafka, his notable productions have included Watashi ga Kodomo Datta Koro (Yomiuri Theater Grand Prix Outstanding Work Award and Outstanding Director Award), Puratounofu (Yuasa Yoshiko Award) and Galileo no Shogai . He is also an assistant professor of the Art Dept, of the School of Literature of Kinki University.