As a playwright and director, Toshiki Okada works not only with his company chelfitsch but also with other theatres in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. Commissioned by the Asian Arts Theatre in 2015, he presented God Bless Baseball with a Japanese and Korean cast, and in 2018, Pratthana – A Portrait of Possession, an adaptation of a novel by Thai author Uthis Haemamool, with a Thai cast. In 2016, he began directing works in a repertory programme at Münchner Kammerspiele, which continued for four consecutive seasons. The Vacuum Cleaner and Doughnuts were selected among “10 remarkable productions” by Theatertreffen in 2020 and 2022 at Berliner Festspiele. His book The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed was published in 2007 and awarded the Oe Kenzaburo Prize the following year. Broccoli Revolution (2022) won the 35th Mishima Yukio Prize. In 2016, the international research conference “Art and Society in Contemporary Japan: The Theatre of Okada Toshiki” was held at Trier University, and Okada Toshiki & Japanese Theatre was published in 2021.

The theatre company chelfitsch was founded in 1997 by Toshiki Okada, who writes and directs all of its productions. chelfitsch attracts keen attention as a troupe in the vanguard of contemporary theatre because of its constant exploration of methods based on the relationship between speech and physical movement. The company made its debut abroad in 2007 when it performed Five Days in March at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. It has produced commissioned works such as Ground and Floor (2013) at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich (2017) at Theater der Welt 2014, NEW ILLUSION (2022) at Ob/Scene Festival, Metamorphosis of a Living Room (2023) at Wiener Festwochen, and has co-produced other pieces with theatres and festivals, altogether having performed in more than 90 cities around the world. In 2021, it launched a workshop with non-native Japanese speakers and premiered The Window of Spaceship ‘In-Between’ in August 2023, a work that will be performed in Brussels, Seoul, and Paris in 2024.