Kaoru Osanai

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

Life

Osanai studied English literature at the University of Tokyo. In 1906 he founded with the authors Tayama Katai and Shimazaki Toson an Ibsen Society for the Study of the works of the Norwegian playwright. With the Kabuki actor Ichikawa Sadanji II in 1907, he founded the Free Theatre ( Jiyu Gekijo ), whose first performance, Ibsen John Gabriel Borkman, 1909 took place.

He undertook in this first theater nor an attempt to perform modern pieces with classic kabuki actors. After a study tour from 1912 to 1913 through Europe, he broke with his second theater establishment, the Tsukiji Little Theater ( with Hijikata Yoshi ) on which he first aufführte Western dramas in Japanese translation, complete with the traditional Japanese theater and was impressed by Edward Gordon Craig, Konstantin Stanislavski and William Archer affected.

1925 led Osanai the performance of the first Japanese radio play. In addition to pieces by Western authors he performed pieces of contemporary Japanese playwright as Mori Ogai, Tsubouchi Shoyo and Kubota Mantaro. Self, he wrote more than thirty pieces, including many adaptations of plays by Western authors like Harold Chapin and Maxim Gorky. Outstanding was Dai'ichi no Sekai ( The first world ), which was premiered in 1921 at the Imperial Theatre and compared with Gerhart Hauptmann's Lonely people.

Swell

• Gabrielle H. Cody, Evert Sprinchorn: The Columbia encyclopedia of modern drama, Volume 2 Columbia University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-231-14424-7, p 1014 limited preview on Google Book Search
• Portraits of Modern Japanese Historical Figures - Osanai, Kaoru