Osanai Kaoru

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Osanai Kaoru

Osanai Kaoru ( Japanese 小山 内 薫 ; born July 26, 1881 in Hiroshima , Hiroshima Prefecture , † December 25, 1928 ) was a Japanese playwright, translator and theater director.

Life

Osanai studied English literature at Tokyo University . In 1906 he founded an Ibsen Society with the authors Tayama Katai and Shimazaki Tōson to study the works of the Norwegian playwright. With the kabuki actor Ichikawa Sadanji II , he founded the Free Theater (Jiyū Gekijō) in 1907, the first performance of which, Ibsen’s drama John Gabriel Borkman , took place in 1909.

In this first theater he attempted to perform modern plays with classic kabuki actors. After a study tour through Europe from 1912 to 1913, he broke completely with traditional Japanese theater when he founded his second theater, the Tsukiji Little Theater (with Hijikata Yoshi ), at which he first performed Western dramas in Japanese translation, and showed himself by Edward Gordon Craig , Konstantin Stanislawski and William Archer influenced.

In 1925, Osanai directed the performance of the first Japanese radio play. In addition to plays by Western authors, he performed plays by contemporary Japanese dramatists such as Mori Ōgai , Tsubouchi Shōyō and Kubota Mantarō . He himself wrote more than thirty pieces, including many adaptations of plays by Western authors such as Harold Chapin and Maxim Gorki . Outstanding was Dai'ichi no Sekai (The First World), which premiered in 1921 at the Imperial Theater and was compared to Gerhart Hauptmann's Einsame Menschen .

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Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Osanai is the family name, Kaoru the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Osanai, Kaoru
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 小山 内 薫 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese playwright, translator and theater director
DATE OF BIRTH July 26, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Hiroshima
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1928