is a Japanese actor, playwright and theatre director who has written and directed more than 40 plays in Japan, and is working to bring modern Japanese theatre to an international audience. Biography Noda was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He briefly attended Tokyo University to study law but eventually dropped out. Noda debuted his first play, An Encounter Between Love and Death during his second year of high school. His second play, The Advent of the Beast, was well received by critics in 1981. This led to his invitation to perform at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, which he already participated in three years earlier. In 2008 he was also appointed artistic director of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space in Ikebukuro, and became a professor in the Department of Scenography Design, Drama, and Dance at Tama Art University. When he was four years old, his family moved from Kyushu to Tokyo. When he reached the age of 16, Noda wrote and staged his very first play. With his high-school friends, he decided to title it, Ai to Shi o Mitsumete (Gaze into Love and Death). Later on in 1976, Noda founded his theatre company named Yume no Yuminsha (Dreaming Bohemian), while he was still in Tokyo University as a law student. Yume no Yuminsha became the emblem of the country's vibrant youth theatre firmament and the leader of a nationwide cultural movement in the early 1980s known as Sho-gekijo (Small-scale Theatre Movement). In 1992, Noda went to London to study theatre. When he returned to Japan, he started the independent company Noda Map, to promote and produce his own plays. He is currently held in high regard within the Japanese theatre community. Japanese theatre director Yukio Ninagawa said of him, "Hideki Noda is the most talented playwright in contemporary Japan." At the age of 27, Noda won Japan's most prestigious theatre accolade, the Kishida Prize for Drama for Nokemono Kitarite (Descent of the Brutes). Tickets to his plays became the hottest of all to get a hold of. Further pushed by Japan's economy, Yume no Yuminsha broke all kinds of records by drawing as much as 26,000 audience to a one-day event at which Noda staged his version of Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelungs presented as a Stonehenge trilogy at the Yoyogi National Gymnasium in Tokyo. In 2006, Noda Hideki wrote The Bee which is coauthored by Colin Teevan. This