Toshiki Okada is a playwright, director and novelist. He formed the theater company “chelfitsch” in 1997, and writes and directs all of its productions. Since 2016, he has also consistently created and directed works in repertory programs at public theaters in Germany. In 2020, his work “The Vacuum Cleaner” (Münchner Kammerspiele) and in 2022, “Doughnuts” (Thalia Theater, Hamburg) were selected as part of the Berliner Theatertreffen’s “10 Remarkable Productions”. He received the 27th Yomiuri Theater Awards Selection Committee Special Prize for his work “Pratthana - A Portrait of Possession,” a stage adaptation of a contemporary Thai novel featuring Thai actors. His work “Unfulfilled Ghost and Monster - ZAHA / TSURUGA” (KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre), which utilizes the narrative structure of noh, won the 72nd Yomiuri Prize for Literature (Play/Scenario Award) and the 25th Tsuruya Namboku Drama Award. In 2021, he directed the opera “Yuzuru” (All Japan Opera Co-Production Project). As a novelist, he published “The End of the Moment We Had” (Shinchōsha) in 2007, which won the 2nd Kenzaburō Ōe Prize. In 2022, he received the 35th Mishima Yukio Prize and the 64th Kumanichi Literary Award for his novel “Broccoli Revolution” (Shinchōsha). From FY2025, he serves as Artistic Director of the Performing Arts Festival: Autumn Meteorite Tokyo, and from FY2026, as Artistic Director (Performing Arts Division) of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre.
In ”Metamorphosis of a Living Room”, the reader is confronted with characters bearing recognizable names from the contemporary everyday world: Adobe, Nokia, IKEA, Rimowa. These names, apparently familiar and ordinary, function not merely as identities, but as symbols of a world organized through objects, brands, and precise functions. Each of them seems to activate a particular dimension of existence: IKEA evokes domestic life and the illusion of comfort, Nokia suggests communication and control, Adobe points toward reason and the artificial construction of reality, while Rimowa evokes mobility, transit, and the fragility of permanence. Together, they compose a fragmented image of modern humanity, no longer understood as a unified individual, but rather as a sum of roles and reactions. In this context, the living room is not simply a physical space, but a place of familiar comfort and presumed stability.
As the play progresses, this stability gradually begins to be questioned. Elusive sensations and anxieties without a clear cause begin to emerge. The world remains recognizable, yet subtly transformed, as if something invisible were altering its rules without completely abolishing them.
An essential element is the appearance of a strange figure who does not belong to this universe of “familiar names.” The presence of this figure introduces another perspective, difficult to define, yet impossible to ignore.
Without offering direct answers, the play invites the reader to ask: how solid is the reality in which we live? And how much of what we consider “normal” is merely a fragile convention?
The play suggests that we are not unified individuals, but functions, products, and roles defined by the system and that this construction operates only until reality itself begins to unravel.
In Toshiki Okada’s play, reality does not suddenly collapse, but slowly dissolves. It is not a play about conflict, eviction, or property, but about the gradual loss of the very idea of the “real.”
Translated by: Mayo Nishiike și Florin Grancea
Cast: Andrei Gîlcescu, Mihai Mocanu, Antonia Dobocan, Gabriela Pîrlițeanu, Ada Bicfalvi, Isabela Haiduc
Event moderated by: Bobi Pricop Duration: 1h 30min Japan
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