Mattias Andersson

He is a Swedish playwright, director, actor, and from 2006 to 2020, he was the artistic director of Backa Teater in Gothenburg. Since 2020, he has been the artistic director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. He graduated from Teaterhögskolan in Gothenburg, where he studied acting from 1990 to 1993. From 1993 to 1996, he worked as an actor at Backa Teater, playing in plays such as Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Goethe’s Faust, the classical Indian epic Mahabharata, and Brendan Behan’s Gisslan. He is currently active primarily as a playwright and director, with about twenty plays staged internationally. He began writing and directing towards the end of his studies, preparing a staging of his own play Och utanför ligger havet in 1993. He continued his path as a director, collaborating with Backa Teater, Angereds Teater, Folkteatern in Gothenburg, Stockholms stadsteater, Unga Klara and the Royal Dramatic Theatre, among others. In his plays and productions, he consistently addresses contemporary social issues. After taking up the position of director of Backa Teater in 2006, he introduced an innovative, award-winning form of work consisting in creating a script based on interviews, research and autobiographical materials obtained from the audience, which allowed the theatre to come closer to real social needs. He inaugurated his method in 2006 with the project “The Mental States of Gothenburg”, and continued, among others, in a project based on Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (2007), “Utopia” (2012), “The Mental States of Sweden” (2013) and “Idioten” (2015).