Playwright, actor and director Hideki Noda has been the undisputed leader of the Japanese contemporary theater world for 30 years. In that time he has written, directed and often acted in more than 60 plays in Japan -- all of them hits or superhits among his mushrooming fanbase. In fact, Noda has been so successful in both the drama world and youth culture that, since the early 1980s, tickets for each new production have unfailingly sold out within hours of going on sale. Not only that, but largely through his success -- which has seen him described in mainstream media as the standard bearer for young artists -- Noda has been instrumental in elevating contemporary theater in Japan from the cliquey side-stream scene it had always inhabited to the vibrant cultural position it now occupies.

Onto even the most gilded of lives, however, a little rain is wont to fall. For Noda, this has come in the form of repeated failures to reproduce his domestic success overseas. There have been two downpours -- The first was his "Half Gods," a manga-mythology drama that left audiences cold at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990. Then, in 2003, his "Red Demon" at the Young Vic theater in London bombed. Despite being staged in English with a blue-chip local cast, that play about Japanese people's dislike of anyone different -- which had been such a hit at home -- seemed irrelevant to audiences (and critics) in a country where racial discrimination has long been illegal and everyone is used to British people who are white, black, brown, yellow or something in between. The Observer's critic stated that "it's as if there's something ineffable lying on the stage, but nobody can be bothered to say what it is."

Failure is perhaps more painful for those who are so used to success. The proudly independent and charismatic 50-year-old dramatist, who was born in Nagasaki, but has been a Tokyo resident since his family moved to the capital when he was 4, was already beginning to be widely known while he was still at high school, where the plays he wrote, directed and acted in have become legendary. One time he had to stage extra performances after students from other neighboring schools began turning up in droves. When he was a student at the prestigious University of Tokyo in the late 1970s, he founded the Yumeno Yuminsha (Dreaming Bohemian) company. While self-mockingly describing himself as "one of the elite" in program notes at that time, the dynamic, idealistic and imaginative productions that Noda began to write, direct and act in with his company were powerful beacons for a generation of artists whose work was part of a social movement stridently challenging the real, aged and conservative elite at the top of the social, political and cultural tree in Japan. Ever quixotic, though, when Yumeno Yuminsha was at the height of its power in 1992, Noda broke up the company and headed to London to study drama for a year on an education ministry (Monbusho) scholarship -- his only break to date from staging productions as Japan's leading contemporary dramatist since beginning his theater career at university.